The origins of London slums date back to the mid eighteenth century, when the population of London, began to grow at an unprecedented rate. In the last decade of the nineteenth century London's population expanded to four million, which spurred a high demand for cheap housing. London slums arose initially as a result of rapid population growth and industrialisation. They became notorious for overcrowding, unsanitary and squalid living conditions. Most well-off Victorians were ignorant or pretended to be ignorant of the subhuman slum life, and many, who heard about it, believed that the slums were the outcome of laziness, sin and vice of the lower classes. However, a number of socially conscious writers, social investigators, moral reformers, preachers and journalists, who sought solution to this urban malady in the second half of the nineteenth century, argued convincingly that the growth of slums was caused by poverty, unemployment, social exclusion and homelessness. The most notorious slum areas were situated in East London, which was often called "darkest London," a terra incognita for respectable citizens. However, slums also existed in other parts of London, e.g. St. Giles and Clerkenwell in central London, the Devil's Acre near Westminster Abbey, Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, on the south bank of the Thames River, the Mint in Southwark, and Pottery Lane in Notting Hill. In the last decades of the Victorian era East London was inhabited predominantly by the working classes, which consisted of native English population, Irish immigrants, many of whom lived in extreme poverty, and immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly poor Russian, Polish and German Jews, who found shelter in great numbers in Whitechapel and the adjoining areas of St. George's-in-the-East and Mile End. The Victorian Rookeries *********************** A rookery was a colloquial term given in the 18th and 19th centuries to a city slum occupied by poor people and frequently also by criminals and prostitutes. Such areas were overcrowded, with low-quality housing and little or no sanitation. Poorly constructed dwellings, built with multiple stories and often crammed into any area of open ground, created densely populated areas of gloomy, narrow streets and alleyways. Thomas Beame's 'The Rookeries of London' (1850) also described one: "The Rookery... was like an honeycomb, perforated by a number of courts and blind alleys, cul de sac, without any outlet other than the entrance. Here were the lowest lodging houses in London, inhabited by the various classes of thieves common to large cities... were banded together... Because all are taken in who can pay their footing, the thief and the prostitute are harboured among those whose only crime is poverty, and there is thus always a comparatively secure retreat for him who has outraged his country's laws. Sums here are paid, a tithe of which, if well laid out, would provide at once a decent and an ample lodging for the deserving poor; and that surplus,which might add to the comfort and better the condition of the industrious, finds its way into the pocket of the middleman...." The St. Giles rookery ********************* As London grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the parish's population, rising to 30,000 by 1831. The Rookery stood between the church and Great Russell Street, and Seven Dials near where Centre Point stands today, now home to the Centrepoint homeless charity. It was of one of the worst slums within Britain, a site of overcrowding and squalor, a semi-derelict warren. From Georgian affluence in the 18th century, the area declined rapidly, as houses were divided up, many families sharing a single room. Irish Catholic immigrants seeking to escape desperate poverty took up residence and the slum was nicknamed "Little Ireland" or "The Holy Land". The expression "a St Giles cellar" passed into common parlance, describing the worst conditions of poverty. Open sewers often ran through rooms and cesspits were left untended. Residents complained to the Times in 1849 : "We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place." The rookery was a maze of gin shops, prostitutes' hovels and secret alleyways that police had little hope of navigating. William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and Gustav Dore, among others, have drawn the area, novelists Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens have written about it extensively. Peter Ackroyd writes "The Rookeries embodied the worst living conditions in all of London's history; this was the lowest point which human beings could reach". Reformer Henry Mayhew described the slum in 1860 in 'A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its close Neighbourhood': "The parish of St. Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a byword as the synonym of filth and squalor. And although New Oxford Street has been carried straight through the middle of the worst part of its slums - "the Rookery" - yet, especially on the south side, there still are streets which demand to be swept away in the interest of health and cleanliness They are a noisy and riotous lot, fond of street brawls, equally "fat, ragged and saucy;" and the courts abound in pedlars, fish-women, newscriers, and corn-cutters." As the population grew, so did their dead, the area a home to cholera and consumption. Eventually there was no room in their grave yard, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many were buried in the cemeteries surrounding St Pancras. From the 1830s to the 1870s plans were developed to demolish the slum as part of London wide clearances for improved transport routes, sanitation and the expansion of the railways. New Oxford Street was driven through the area to join the areas of Oxford Street and Holborn. The Rookery dwellers were not re-housed by the authorities. 5000 were evicted and many just moved into near by slums, such Devil's Acre and Church Lane making those more overcrowded still. The unchanging character of the area, failing investment schemes and inability to sell new properties ensured that plans for wholesale clearance were stymied until the end of the century. Jacob's Island Rookery ********************** Jacob's Island was a notorious rookery in 1840's Bermondsey, on the south bank of the River Thames in London. It was separated from Shad Thames to the west by St Saviour's Dock, the point where the subterranean River Neckinger enters the Thames, and on the other two sides by tidal ditches, one just west of George Row and the other just north of London Street (now named Wolseley Street). Jacob's Island was immortalised by Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, in which the principal villain Bill Sikes meets a nasty end in the mud of 'Folly Ditch'. Dickens provides a vivid description of what it was like: "... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it - as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island." Dickens was taken to this then-impoverished and unsavoury location by the officers of the river police, with whom he would occasionally go on patrol. When a local politician attempted to deny the very existence of Jacob's Island, Dickens gave him short shrift, describing the area as "the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London". The area was once notoriously squalid and described as "The very capital of cholera" and "The Venice of drains" by the Morning Chronicle of 1849. The ditches were filled in the early 1850s, and the area later redeveloped as warehouses. Henry Mayhew described Jacob's Island thus: "On entering the precincts of the pest island the air had literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness came over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the moist atmosphere. Not only the nose, but the stomach told how heavily the air was loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen; and as soon as you crossed one of the crazy and rotten bridges over the reeking ditch, you knew, as surely as if you had chemically tested it, by the black colour of what was once white lead paint upon the door posts and window sills, that the air was thickly charged with this deadly gas. The heavy bubbles which now and then rose up in the water showed you whence at least a portion of the mephitic compound issued, while the open doorless privies that hung over the water-side, and the dark streaks of filth down the walls, where the drains from each house discharged themselves in to the ditch were proofs indisputable as to how the pollution of the ditch occurred. "The water was covered with scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it floated large masses of rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges were swollen carcases of dead animals, ready to burst with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores were heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphoretted smell from which told you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster-shells were like pieces of slate from their coating of filth and mud. In some parts the fluid was as red as blood from the colouring matter that poured into it from the reeking leather dressers' close by." Jacob's Island was extensively bombed during the Second World War and today only one Victorian warehouse survives. Over the past twenty years the Island area has undergone considerable regeneration and gentrification, including a development by architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands. The Old Nichol Street Rookery ***************************** In Victorian Britain of the 1880s, the Old Nichol was London's most notorious slum. The Old Nichol, also known as the Nichol or the Old Nichol Street Rookery, was an area of housing in the East End of London, between High Street, Shoreditch, Hackney Road in the north, and Spitalfields in the south. The main streets within the Old Nichol were Boundary Street, Old Nichol Street, Half Nichol Street, The Mount and Church Street. The slum was located in the western boundary of Bethnal Green, with six of its streets across Boundary Street located in Shoreditch. The Old Nichol was home to 5,719 people, living in a dense network of about 30 streets and courts. The late 18th-century houses included workshops and stables. In 1863 the periodical 'The Builder' contained a report describing the conditions in the Old Nichol: "With few exceptions, each room contains a separate family; some consisting of mother, father, and eight children. The first two adjoining houses that we looked into, of six rooms each, contained forty-eight persons. To supply these with water, a stream runs for ten or twelve minutes each day, except Sunday, from a small tap at the back of one of the houses... The houses are, of course, ill-ventilated. The front room in the basement, wholly below the ground, dark and damp, is occupied, at a cost of 2s. a week for rent." And on 24 October 1863 'The Illustrated London News' published an article "Dwellings of the Poor in Bethnal-Green" which also described the living conditions in the Old Nichol, although in a slightly more tabloid-friendly way: "This district of Friars-mount, which is nominally represented by Nichols-street, Old Nichols-street, and Half Nichols-street, including, perhaps most obviously, the greater part of the vice and debauchery of the district, and the limits of a single article would be insufficient to give any detailed description of even a day's visit. There is nothing picturesque in such misery; it is but one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth, and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, teeming with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were the inclination, for the most ordinary observations of decency or cleanliness." On 31 October 1863 'The Builder' published an article "More Revelations of Bethnal Green", describing the underground rooms of the Old Nichol: "The occupation of the underground rooms here, as well as elsewhere, is illegal, and may at once be prevented. Under the Local Management Act, as our readers may remember, an underground room may not be occupied separately as a dwelling unless certain conditions are complied with, one of which is that there shall be a window of specified size, with an area before it open down to 6 inches below the floor of the room... One of the worst examples that we saw of these underground rooms we must endeavour to illustrate. It is in Nichol-street, No.59, and may be described as entirely below the surface. the window of the apartment is a little over 3 feet in width, and about the same in height; the area is even with the breadth and depth of the window. It extends from the wall about 2 feet, and was closed with an iron grating; but this having become broken, the entire top of the area has been covered with wood, so that the only means of light and ventilation is a chink 3 feet wide by 4 and a half inches in height. Passing through the passage to the back, the dilapidated condition of the premises, as may be seen in the sketch, is startling. The plaster has fallen from the walls and the ceilings, the narrow staircase is rotten and shaky, the general colour is of a dingy smoky black, with peeps of indifferent brickwork and broken laths. At the back there is a large open space, in a most filthy condition; damp refuse of all kinds is piled up against the wall; there is no supply of water;" Another good description of it's squalor was written by journalist Christopher Hudson in 2008: It was the worst slum in Victorian Britain. ******************************************* Charles Mowbray, former soldier, master tailor and one of the greatest working-class orators in late Victorian England, had only to look out of his cracked window in London's East End to know this was the place to start the revolution. As his pay had been slashed to subsistence levels, so Mowbray had been driven to take refuge at the bottom of the heap, in the worst, most soul-destroying slum in the greatest city on Earth. Its name was the Old Nichol, possibly derived from the name of the devil himself, Old Nick. Situated in Bethnal Green and part of Shoreditch, it was only 25 minutes' walk from the Bank of England. But the Old Nichol, a maze of rotting streets hemmed in by bleak tenement buildings, might as well have been on a different planet. Most Londoners preferred to forget that it even existed. When Mowbray put on his boots and walked through the Old Nichol, he passed down narrow, muddy streets, skirting pools of filthy liquid and the carcasses of dogs and cats. Eyes watched him greedily through broken window panes. Mowbray would go on to decry the injustices of the age and was an impassioned socialist. And given his surroundings, it is hardly surprising that the slum's most famous son spoke so loudly. No grass grew in this dark and putrid labyrinth. The narrow canyons of blackened brick tenements blocked out the sun and all colour was leached away except for the dull greys of smoke and soot. In a two-room tenement in Anne Court, just around the corner from where Mowbray lived, the meagre fire burning in the grate drew moisture out of the saturated plaster, creating wisps of fog inside the house. In the Old Nichol, there was no escape from the gloom. Its two tiny rooms were home to a married couple and six children, but there were no beds. When Montagu Williams, a magistrate and writer, asked how they slept, the mother replied: 'Oh, we sleep how we can.' Through the hole in the wall which served as a door, Williams could see the woman's haggard, hollow cheeked husband and two teenage sons making uppers for boots. Many of these houses were below pavement level and so flooded when it rained. In cold weather - and warmth was a luxury in the Old Nichol - broken panes were blocked up with anything that came to hand: newspapers, rags, sometimes old hats. In winter, even the water jugs iced over. Mowbray lived with his wife and four children in a little room in Boundary Street, which marked the border between Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. Around the corner, in a single room, a missionary had recently discovered a single woman nursing a feverish young girl. On the floor lay the body of the woman's six-year-old son, who had died a few hours earlier. Her husband, a singer of street ballads, had refused to return home because a public hanging at Tyburn had drawn the crowds and business was good. When he did get back to his dead child, he stormed out again at the sight of the missionary urging his wife to pray. It is hard to believe that such obscenities were allowed to persist in the richest city in the Empire. Sarah Wise's 'The Blackest Streets' reveals that the Nichol's 30 or so streets housed around 5,700 people and had a death rate that was almost double that of neighbouring areas. A quarter of all children born in the Nichol died before their first birthday and Old Nichol Street itself was described by the local medical officer, Dr Bate, as being unfit for human habitation. Damp, overcrowding and the unwholesome air were largely to blame. But so was sheer despair. In 1887, five out of every six infants to die in Bethnal Green homes where the whole family shared a bed were found to have suffocated. Coroners attributed most of these deaths to 'overlaying', during which a sleeping parent or sibling rolled onto the infant and accidentally smothered it. Others, however, suspected that many were intentionally suffocated, by desperate mothers with too many mouths to feed. The close quarters in which the slum dwellers lived had other inevitable consequences. Families slept in one bed, washed together and regularly saw one another naked. The children watched their elders having sex. Many believed sexual abuse was uncommon, but Beatrice Webb, one of the founders of the LSE, wrote: 'To put it bluntly, sexual promiscuity and even sexual perversion - the violation of little children - are almost unavoidable among men and women of average character and intelligence crowded into the one-room tenements of slum areas.' But there was little profit to be made by improving things. Much of the housing was owned by churchmen and peers of the realm, and they had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. These 'vampyres of the poor', as one contemporary newspaper called them, were sitting on some of the most profitable property in London - making returns on their investment of up to 150 per cent. The landlords might complain about the odd tenant skipping rent payments or thieves stripping the lead from roofs, but these were minor irritations in the light of such extortionate profits. In fact, hardly anybody in the Old Nichol even knew who their landlords were. They acted through lawyers, themselves shadowy figures, and the whole system was ratified by the Bethnal Green Vestry, a squad of venal councillors who operated as the local authority. These Vestrymen blocked repeated attempts by politicians, from the 1850s on, to have the whole slum demolished. Mugging was commonplace in the Old Nichol - although perhaps no more so than in London today. The magistrate Montagu Williams, for example, warned a victim: 'It is as certain as the day is long that if you go out to get drunk, and have money in your pocket, you will, in this neighbourhood, get robbed.' More violent crimes, however, were rare. According to the Old Bailey archives, between 1885 and 1895 only one murder occurred within the Old Nichol, when a middle-aged shoemaker stabbed his wife to death. Domestic violence was commonplace, but it stopped short of murder. However, Charles Mowbray was planning bigger things. In the two years to 1886, unemployment among London's unionised workforce quadrupled to 10 per cent. The coldest February in 30 years stopped work at the docks, and in the first of a series of mass demonstrations, the jobless stoned the windows of Pall Mall clubs and looted shops in Piccadilly. On Bloody Sunday, 20 months later, a similar demonstration brought the police out in force. Mounted police and foot guards charged the crowds. Mowbray was not present, but he was an enthusiastic propagandist for the struggle. 'MURDER!' his posters read. 'Workmen, why allow yourselves, your wives and children to be daily murdered by the foulness of the dens in which you are forced to live! 'It is time the slow murder of the poor, who are poisoned by thousands in the foul, unhealthy slums from which robber landlords exact monstrous rents was stopped. You have paid in rent the value over and over again of the rotten dens in which you're forced to dwell. Government has failed to help you. The time has come to help yourselves.' Mowbray was later jailed for nine months for inciting a non-existent riot and eventually fled to the U.S., lecturing the length of the East Coast on socialism, before being deported back to Britain as an undesirable. He spent his last years in Forest Gate, dying in 1910. Well before that, however, his message had been heeded. A new and vigorous London County Council (LCC) came into being, and its first, flagship task was the demolition of Old Nichol, and the eviction and rehousing of its inhabitants. The Bethnal Green vestrymen, now replaced by the London County Council, were seen to reel in disgust as they toured the fetid streets. The major landlords emerged from anonymity to claim compensation, the greediest of them being the Church of England's Commissioners. In March 1900, seven years after the first demolitions, the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra processed in a carriage down a broad, tree-lined avenue, under which lay the rubble of the slum. Ugliness had been replaced by beauty. The only losers were the evicted inhabitants of the Old Nichol. Too poor to move elsewhere, they were shoved into neighbouring streets, which in turn became slums. For Britain's poorest, it seemed, history was doomed to repeat itself. (article abridged from the Daily Mail 10th July 2008) Sources: www.victorianweb.org en.wikipedia.org www.history.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk/history