Seven Dials was regarded as a slum by the Victorians, and after the first world war attracted French refugees, a transient population of sailors, and people from across the British empire. It was known pejoratively as London’s “Black colony”, a term that Houlbrook unpacks through this meticulously researched book. His “painstaking effort to reimagine Seven Dials as a place of home, work, and play” energises the pages with the bustle of streets that once had a population density double that of the rest of London. These stagehands, fruit and flower sellers, waiting staff, barrow boys, criminals and artisans bustle through the text, haunting warehouses, factories for making boxes, tarpaulins and glue, as well as tailors and dressmakers, printers, pubs, cafes and a fencing academy.
