Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars

by Jerry White

From the 1880s to the Second World War, Campbell Road, Finsbury Park (known as Campbell Bunk), had a notorious reputation for violence, for breeding thieves and prostitutes, and for an enthusiastic disregard for law and order. It was the object of reform by church, magistrates, local authorities, and social scientists, who left many traces of their attempts to improve what became known as 'the worst street in North London'. Jerry White offers insight into the realities of life in a 'slum' community, showing how it changed over a 90-year period. Using extensive oral history to describe in detail the years between the wars, White reveals the complex tensions between the new world opening up and the street's traditional culture of economic individualism, crime, street theatre, and domestic violence.

Genres: London, Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 1986

About the author

Professor of London history

Reviews

[Paul]

An excellent piece of social and oral history about Campbell Road in North London, otherwise known as Campbell Bunk. This focuses primarily on the period between the wars, although there are chapters on the development of the road, its pre First World War history and post 1945 history until it was demolished in the 1950s. White follows a number of the individuals and families throughout the period. This was researched and written in the 1970s and early 1980s and so White was able to interview some of the people he writes about: the original voices do add an extra dimension. It was also good to read a piece of Marxist historiography which takes note of and assesses the place of class.
The book covers all aspects of life, particularly family relations, living conditions, employment, entertainment, crime and punishment, violence and abuse. The shadow of the workhouse is present. Religion occasionally tries to permeate with little success. Information comes from police and court records, from other surviving written records from a variety of sources and oral accounts.
The oral accounts make the book. Take this from a young thief in 1933:
“Why should I be singled out to walk the places – nowhere to go, nothing to eat? Mother at home crying, Dad’s out of work and you see all those people with lovely horses coming down Holloway Road there, and always going out shopping with bags of servants – never used to seem right to me, somehow. Something seemed to be wrong, something’s missing, you know, something’s gotta be put right. I used to rebel against this. I used to take things as a right. If my brothers and sisters were at home crying, they got nothing to eat, and there’s a bakers shop just round the corner full of bread! Course I’m going to nick some bread. It’s mine! I want some.”
Crime started young, sometimes with training from parents and White refers to the street as a “collective Artful Dodger”. Police had to walk down in twos and were often attacked if they tried to make an arrest. Most of the work people did was casual, short term labouring, totters and costermongers. Women worked in factories or charring. There was also a great deal of unemployment, especially if you were disabled. Violence was a commonplace between men and women, parents and children. Attitudes were plain and sometimes brutal as with this advice from mother to daughter:
“She always warned me my mother did: “If you ever marry a man” she said …. “who knocks you about, just wait until he gets in bed and get the chopper or the hammer and break his legs. He can’t run after you and pay you no more.””
Or this reported by a policeman from the mid-1930s:
“On Sunday afternoon I was walking up the Bunk when a little girl came out of the house crying and said to me “Come in our house and see what mummy’s done to dad.” I went with the child and on the living room floor lying unconscious and spread-eagled on his back was the bald-headed husband, his head covered in blood. Standing over him, holding by the handle the remains of a chamber pot was a grim faced wife. The remainder of the pot was shattered round his head on the floor. “What’s happened here?” I asked. She looked at me for a moment then said, “I had just emptied this when he came in as usual pissed. His first words were, “I’m the King of the Castle”, so I fucking crowned him.” He came to a short time after but he refused to charge her for assault.”
The history records great bleakness and poverty along with a certain resilience and humour. The name was changed to Whadcoat Street in the late 1930s to try to change the reputation, but that was pretty much ignored. This is a very good piece of historical research about an area of history that has been often ignored.

[K.J. Charles]

A fascinating social history of Campbell Street, a horrendous slum, and the lives and struggles of its inhabitants between the 20s and 40s. Absolutely horrifying stuff at points, with the depiction of human degradation and awfulness, but also a kind of exhilarating, stubborn defiance. The first part is hard going because the author is taking a Marxist view of history with associated verbiage, but at least I've finally learned what lumpenproletariat means. Terrific London history from the expert.

[John Newcomb]

I have not read a proper ideological marxist history book for a while. Reading one about my old neighborhood was novel. White brings the voices and lifestyle of the impoverished and criminal underclass of Finsbury Park to life. It made me feel a little homesick.

[Malcolm]

This is a simply suberb local history of a single Islington street during the first half of the 20th century. White has a subtle and sophisticated grasp of the dynamics of London life, and in this case takes us inside a working class part of town in a way that is carefully aware of class and gender dynamics, the significance of both work and everyday life in making peoples. This is one of a small cluster of books that inspired me to begin to call myself a historian, and to continue to study. It has a major place in my heart.

[Harry C]

‘I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye […] She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery […] She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe’ (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 1972), p. 16.).

Slum life in interwar Britain was characterised by lack: basic amenities necessary for decent living were inexistent and compensatory systems of mutual support were necessary for survival. Infamously poor and notoriously lawless, Campbell Road in Islington, North London, is the focus of Jerry White’s stimulating study. During the 1970s and 1980s, The History Workshop, run by Raphael Samuel, published a series of studies into the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ men and women throughout Britain. Born out of the trade-union affiliated Ruskin College, Oxford, this network is credited with expanding a noteworthy paradigm of historical research: ‘history from below’. Building on that, White seeks to reconstruct the internal logic that distinguishes Campbell Bunk – the nature of family life, mutual support and identity – whilst exploring its relationship with the outside world (p. 3). His microhistory successfully embeds this unique space in the general patterns of change in London, its real estate market, and urban Britain more generally.

Without attachment to any research institute, White makes creative use of the limited written evidence about the street (available in South England’s bookstores), meticulously scrutinised census material, and most importantly, oral history interviews. He also scrutinises evidence from magistrates, churchmen and social workers. But it is the oral histories that bring Campbell Bunk to life, illuminating inter-war change through the contradictions of class, gender and age/generation (p. 6). In order to make sense of Campbell Road’s contradictions, White employs a Marxian conceptual apparatus to understand the dynamics of class structure (pp. 27-70). This is successful inasmuch as it is able to delineate Campbell Road relative to life in North London and to place its residents within the context of the city’s reserve army of labour. That said, White’s application of ‘lumpenproletariat’ to those who worked outside of London’s salaried economy leaves little room to assess the relative autonomy of those instincts and beliefs of the very poor that are not dictated by the structural determinants of working-class life (See Martin Daunton's review).

White does concede that this framework alone cannot explain what those who were defined as the social problem thought and felt, and how they made sense of it. Thus, he also interrogates identity (pp. 71-101), ideology (pp. 102-133), and gender (pp. 134-237) in order to understand tradition, continuity and change in the bunk. White’s borrowing from the theoretical apparatus of feminism is particularly fruitful in noting the constructed nature of gender categories among the Bunk’s young inhabitants. As he demonstrates, young men acted as conduits for tradition and continuity, while young women provided the impulse for change through the growing employment opportunities made available to them in London’s post-slump commercial sector (p. 190).

Campbell Bunk is an impressively thorough account of inter-war life on one of Britain’s most deprived streets. It is no easy to task to combine such a rigorous analysis with an equally sensitive treatment of oral sources, all the while without descending into the sentimentality that so often accompanies narratives of bygone communities of great poverty. Indeed, White leaves no room for doubt that horrendous living conditions and the ubiquity of violence meant that life on Campbell Road was not a desirable one. The resilience and the communitarianism constructed by its residents constituted an attempt to carve out a space of protection in a world that was hostile towards their very existence (as shown by constant plans for reconstruction). The book’s qualities add up to a highly moving story that stands as a contribution to our understanding of the cultural evolution of Britain’s urban poor since the late Victorian period. Although intended as a book for the general reader, Campbell Bunk merits attention from any researchers interested in modern British history, the sociology of urban poverty, and gender studies.

[Mike Ward]

fascinating and very readable

http://0651frombrighton.blogspot.co.u...

[Jwalth]

Brilliant. Loved the tales of life and the author's Marxist prism, so great to see working class life depicted unapologetically.