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.