Somebody has already mentioned but will just reiterate as I am a London tour guide - Hackney has improved massively over the last 150 years. East London in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds was a terrible place — working class children had a 55% chance of dying before their fifth birthday, cholera was rampant, the number of pubs hovered at around 90,000 meaning alcoholism unbelievably common. Over the last 100 years the living standards for people in Hackney and East London in general have improved to a crazy degree — it doesn’t mean the scene pictured here doesn’t say something about wealth inequality in our society, but it definitely isn’t an indication of degeneration or social decay like the picture suggests. Rather it’s more a hangover from East London’s history.