Photographing an east London rent strike, 1939

A new wave of socially engaged photography emerged in the 1930s. Russian-born Arapoff was one of the leaders of this style in England. Using a fast miniature Rolleiflex camera, a popular camera at the time, he captured London through subjects like the industrial River Thames and the East End.

Arapoff’s work was often exhibited and published in popular illustrated magazines. His story on the Hanbury Buildings was commissioned by Picture Post, then the leading magazine for photojournalism. The images were never published. But they’ve left us with an important record both of housing conditions in the East End, and of collective movements for tenants’ rights.

The Hanbury Buildings were built in around 1887. It was a five-storey block with seven two-roomed flats per floor. The building replaced the six houses on Hanbury Place, in which residents also lived in poor conditions. One 1886 news article reported how families had lived with “choked drains, flooded with sewage, and no water” for 26 days.

Hanbury Building residents had lived in poor conditions for many years. In 1919, the Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst even wrote about their struggle in an article about Poplar housing in the Workers’ Dreadnought, the newspaper she founded and edited.

Pankhurst noted how “there is no water in the apartments; it has to be carried from the washhouse”. Not much had changed 20 years later. The block still had very basic water and sewage facilities. There were three toilets and one tap per floor located in a common area. The washroom, seen in this photo, had cold water only.

“The light in most of the rooms is dim... The rain beating on the stairway… the dripping from the tap in the wash-house used by so many people, [makes] the stone floor of the dark passage wet and muddy. Smoke pours from the wash-house. The socket holding the basin in which the clothes are boiled is broken away and through the holes the fierce flames rise up.”

In 1936, a London County Council medical officer of health reported the block’s “superficial dilapidation” was “very evident at first sight”. He noted that the building was overcrowded and that its sanitary facilities were a possible danger to health. In 1937, some bug-ridden rooms were considered unfit to live in and closed.

In 1939, residents joined the Poplar Tenants' Defence League to organise a rent strike. They demanded that the landlord should reduce the weekly rents, remove the widespread damp, fix the overflowing drains, provide taps and sinks in each flat, and replace the collapsed fireplaces. Here, two neighbours compare rent books, which recorded how much rent they paid.

In November 1939, the landlord of the Hanbury Buildings took legal action against the tenants and brought them to Bow County Court. He wanted to evict them for refusing to pay their rent. During the trial, one architect giving evidence said he’d never seen flats in a worse condition.

The judge ruled that the Hanbury residents were within their rights to withhold their rent. He also found that the landlord had been overcharging them for rent and that repairs hadn’t been carried out. But before anything could be done, the block was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz. The buildings were demolished between 1950 and 1955.