Campbell Bunk (The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars)

Most studies of the British working-class experience deal with labor aristocrats and the "respectable poor." Campbell Bunk gives the first full account of a "rough," sub-proletarian community and the forces which molded, changed, and eventually destroyed it. From the 1880s to World War II, 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 theater, and domestic violence.