This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Over the summer, I have been preoccupied not so much by architecture per se as by shops — the essential role they play in creating and sustaining an urban environment, not just a convenient source of things to buy.
This is because the best of our local food stores, Leila’s Shop, at the heart of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, originally established by Leila McAlister at no.17 Calvert Avenue (now also at no.15 with a café next door), has been threatened with closure owing to a threefold increase in its rent, originally on 1 October with three months’ notice, now postponed to 31 January to see if Tower Hamlets can come up with a better solution.
The Boundary Estate was designed in the early 1890s by Owen Fleming, a young architect working for the newly established London County Council. It was a model housing development, based on the ideas of William Morris and Philip Webb, to replace a notorious east end slum, known as the Old Nichol.
Friedrich Engels, writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, described how, “It is nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children, and, sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room of ten to twelve square feet, where they eat, sleep and work.”
Five years later Henry Mayhew described how:
Roads were unmade, often mere alleys, houses small and without foundations, subdivided and often around unpaved courts. An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat’s meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and “lakes of putrefying night soil” added to the filth.
The opportunity to demolish the existing warren of streets and reconstruct them afresh came with the establishment of the London County Council (LCC) in 1889 and the Housing of the Working Classes Act the following year. Demolition of the 15 acres of housing in the Old Nichol began in 1891.
The initial plan for its replacement consisted of classic, five-storey apartment buildings arranged on a straightforward grid following the pattern of the philanthropic housing common elsewhere in east London; but Fleming, who joined the Architects’ Department from the Architectural Association in 1890 and was a founder member of its Housing of the Working Classes Branch in 1893, argued in favour of them being spaced out irregularly on streets radiating out from a rond-point with a small garden at its heart, constructed as a mound with a bandstand on top, not erected till 1912.
Fleming and his colleagues in the Architects’ Department wanted the estate to have something of the character of an English country town; and Calvert Avenue which led up to Shoreditch Church had shops on either side, intended to be an important part of the urban community.
There were 18 shops, a surgery, 77 workshops, costermongers’ sheds, and a central laundry with bathrooms and two clubrooms, but no pubs and rules to enforce sobriety.
Instead of accommodating the previous tenants or being made available to the poor, the Boundary Estate was used to house what we would now regard as key workers — clerks, policemen and nurses.
Indeed, Arthur Osborne Jay, the vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, who had been a vocal advocate for slum clearance, was in favour of transportation for criminals and believed that, as a way of ridding society of its criminal element, they should not be allowed to procreate.
The shop occupied by Leila McAlister was originally a fruit and vegetable store opened in 1900, run by Alf Raymond, whose family lived in the flat above it. After serving in the First World War, Alf’s son, also called Alfred, carried on running the shop until his death in 1966.
By then, supermarkets were already beginning to replace local shops and the pattern of local shopping was changing. A branch of Key Markets, one of the early supermarket chains, opened in the Bethnal Green Road in the 1960s and a Tesco store arrived in 1969. At the time that Leila McAlister took on the lease of 17 Calvert Avenue in 2002, it was derelict and had been unoccupied for more than ten years.
Leila McAlister was brought up in Islington, educated at Camden School for Girls and, before reading Russian at the School of Slavonic Studies, spent a year in Poland in the last months of communism and was surprised by the access to good homegrown food in local markets.
Working for Neal’s Yard in the 1990s, she became interested in how to help small, more specialist local suppliers whose products were not being stocked, regarded as too expensive by the supermarkets.
She has focused on supplying the best quality of food which she sources direct from the farmers themselves or from specialist suppliers, such as the bakery E5, whose founder, Ben Mackinnon, she helped with advice when it was first established, and Charlie Macintosh who runs a small brewery in Hammersmith.
Now Tower Hamlets is destroying the business and all the other traders in the street by employing a third party, Exigen, to raise the rent to what it regards as the market level.
This is a morality tale as to how Britain, once a nation of shopkeepers, allows local authorities to support rack-renting landlords and drive specialist shops and small traders out of business.
