Boundary Estate

The Boundary Estate is a housing development in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London. The estate, constructed from 1890, was one of the earliest social housing schemes built by a local government authority. It was built on the site of the demolished Friars Mount rookery in the Old Nichol, with works begun by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1893 and completed by the recently formed London County Council. Soil from the foundations was used to construct a mound in the middle of Arnold Circus at the centre of the development, surmounted by an extant bandstand. The estate consists of multistorey brick tenements radiating from the central circus, each of which bears the name of a town or village along the non-tidal reaches of the Thames. For administrative purposes, the estate lay just within the boundaries of the historical parish and (from 1900) Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, which in 1965 became part of the new London Borough of Tower Hamlets. For ecclesiastical purposes, it lay within the parish of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, created in 1866. The estate's name reflects its borderline location.