Construction on the Downham Estate in 1925. This was one of eventually 13 ‘cottage estates’ built by the London County Council in the interwar years as part of a huge social and economic transformation of Britain, partly fuelled by the demands of those back from conflict that they not return to the terrible inner-city living conditions they’d left behind. A little more than 100 years ago, the scale of poverty and deprivation in London’s inner-city slums was dramatic.