St Stephen's Gardens Garden

St Stephen's Gardens might look like a quiet residential pocket today, but the ground beneath you has a volatile history. By the mid twentieth century, the elegant Victorian townhouses that once lined this street had deteriorated into one of London's most notorious slums. This area became the epicenter of the property empire of Peter Rachman, a landlord whose name became synonymous with the exploitation of tenants. His practice of packing vulnerable people into subdivided, decaying rooms in these very houses eventually helped expose a pattern of housing abuse that reached all the way into the national headlines of the Profumo Affair. The original terraces were eventually demolished in the mid nineteen seventies to make way for the current housing estate, leaving this green space as a survivor of a neighborhood that was completely remade to move past its turbulent past.