A grimmer picture emerges in a celebrated black-and-white photograph showing schoolboys in a sunless industrial city playing against stumps roughly outlined in chalk on a wall.

The latter is the environment embraced by the Chance to Shine campaign, a bold campaign designed to reinvigorate cricket in English state schools.

Judy Coles is head teacher at The Hague School in Bethnal Green in the heart of London's East End; once a haunt of Jack the Ripper, pounded relentlessly by German bombers during the blitz in World War Two and home to the notorious Kray twins who ruled the London underworld during the 1960s.

Populated by French Huguenot silk weavers in the 18th century, its streets now reflect modern Britain's complex ethnic diversity.

Coles said that 96 percent of pupils at The Hague, a short walk from Bethnal Green underground station, were of Bangladeshi origin, the result of the latest wave of immigration.

"Within my school, cricket is my passion," she said "It is sort of a rite of passage isn't it? That your brother did it, your sister did it and it becomes part of the culture.

"It's not to the exclusion of other sports, last year we offered 26 different sports from canoeing to climbing, the full range."

The president of Chance to Shine is Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. Its director of operations is Wasim Khan, one of the first men born in Britain of Asian parents to play county cricket.

Nick Landon, a former teacher, is the president of the Cricket Foundation, the charity behind Chance to Shine which he says is the largest grassroots initiative in a single sport in British history.

Crucial to the Chance to Shine initiative are the links arranged between schools and local clubs with the help of the county boards.

Neville Cardus, the great Manchester Guardian cricket writer and music critic, once praised WG Grace, the best cricketer of the 19th century, for bringing a country game to fashionable St John's Wood, the home of Lord's.

To which an equally great cricket writer, the West Indian Marxist CLR James, retorted: "There they needed it least. It was to bleak Sheffield, to dusty Kennington and to grim Manchester that WG brought the life they had left behind."

In these and other outwardly unpromising areas, Chance to Shine is successfully implementing a noble ambition.