Slum Living: London's Rookeries-
In 1904, the last slum was cleared from central London in a fit of Edwardian sanitizing. Whilst the most famous rookeries were the Rats' Castle in St Giles (where Seven Dials still sits) and Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, this slum was a little closer to the heart of things: The Strand. At the end of my last post, I mentioned the redevelopment of the Strand slums, in which around four thousand people were displaced.
London has managed to retain much of its character over the centuries, although much of its fabric has been lost. It can be argued that the Victorians did more damage than the Great Fire, and the town planners (or village idiots, depending on your perspective) of the 1960s destroyed more than the Luftwaffe. The photographs in the gallery give an idea of what London was really like in the late 19th century. I have deliberately relied on photographs (with one exception), because I think the Victorians, Dickens included, did an enormous amount to create the modern stereotype of the London 'Rookeries', and I think it is useful to see how they sprang from the communal construction and courtyard living of medieval London. The idea that one could walk into a rookery by accident and not walk out alive was no doubt based upon the truth, but the fact is, these sinkhole slums existed right in the heart of London and every day people issued forth from them to work and trade with the rest of the city. Sometimes they were no more than a medieval courtyard or two that had survived the Fire and then become ever more down on its luck; sometimes they were vast warrens of streets (the Strand rookery stretched from Temple to Charing Cross).
The Victorian slums were extreme, but their roots began in the 18th century, when London began to grow at an unprecedented rate. Medieval buildings which had survived the fire were suddenly old-fashioned, and did not have all the new amenities, such as piped water. They were reliant upon the wells and pumps which were increasingly polluted by nearby cess-pits and the street-borne filth trickling through the gratings. (One excellent little snippet I discovered today: it was the done thing for men who were caught short to stand on the edge of the pavement and urinate into the road, rather than against a wall, which was the property of another and therefore, rude. The traffic was expected to ignore being splashed, although foreign diaries record Continental disgust at this 'low habit'.) Medieval and early modern buildings became cheap and were bought up by shrewd landlords for cheap lodgings, or as brothels. A prime example of this is Dyott House, which stood in Dyott Street near St Giles-in-the-Fields Church. An early Victorian account of the St Giles slum is very interesting, and the bare bones of how the people lived in his record are very unlikely to have changed much since the Georgian period. Henry Mayhew's writings cover the industries of the slums, the crime, the accommodation and the people, and they are very interesting.
On visiting a room in the garret, we saw a man, in mature years, making artificial flowers; he appeared to be very ingenious, and made several roses before us with marvelous rapidity. He had suspended along the ceiling bundles of dyed grasses of various hues, crimson, yellow, green, brown, and other colours to furnish cases of stuffed birds. He was a very intelligent man and a natural genius. He told us strong drink had brought him to this humble position in the garret...
Charles Dickens is one of the most famous authors to write about the London slums. I try to steer clear of quoting his fiction, but Sketches by Boz (1839), although three years beyond my period, is valuable as an account of how desperate things became under later population pressures:
Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three - fruit and 'sweet-stuff' manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a 'musician' in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one - filth everywhere - a gutter before the houses and a drain behind - clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.
The strong-backed, hard-drinking Irish labourers, upon whom so many London fortunes were built, made up a large part of the slum-dwelling population, and were frequently derided for it, as in this later account:
St. George's-in-the-Borough, with its back courts, where the refuse of Ireland vegetate; or Kent Street,- the thieves' district,- which years since drew forth the indignation of the topographist; or Pearl Row, St. George's Road, Southwark; or Red House, Old Gravel Lane, Borough; or a lodging house for thieves at the back of Holborn, where 100 thieves are to be seen, at eleven o'clock at night, on an average, six sometimes in one bed ; or the lower part of Bell Street, Paddington, for the lower class of thieves, such as costermongers, &c.; or the courts and alleys leading out of Tooley Street, City, all the courts inhabited by Irish thieves, &c.; or Rents Buildings, York Street, Westminster, inhabited by pickpockets and juvenile thieves...
By 1816, a Parliamentary Committee had been set up to establish the problems of the London slums, and what might be done about them. Professionals were called in to give evidence and to account for their experience of the slums. One London doctor, William Blair, had this to say:
Human beings, hogs, and dogs, were associated in the same habitations; and great heaps of dirt, in different quarters, may be found piled up in the streets. Another reason of their ill health is this, that some of the lower inhabitations have neither windows nor chimneys nor floors, and were so dark that I can scarcely see there at midday without a candle. I have actually gone into a ground floor bedroom, and could not find my patient without the light of a candle
The darkness was largely a result of unscrupulous landlords shutting up windows to avoid window tax. As intolerable as these dark lodgings were, there was always a respite: the pub/lodging/pawn-shop/repository for stolen goods/brothel, or flash-house as they were known:
There are above two hundred regular flash houses in the metropolis, all known the police officers, which they frequent, many of them, open all night: that the landlords in numerous instances receive stolen goods, and are what are technically called fences; that this fact is known also to the officers, who, for obvious reasons, connive at the existence of these houses; that many of house are frequented by boys and girls of the ages of ten to fourteen and fifteen, who are exclusively admitted, who pass the night in gambling & debauchery, and who there sell and divide the plunder of the day, or who sally forth from these houses to rob in the street.
One rather bizarre aspect of many of the accounts of the slums is that of the young (borderline legal at 12ish, the age of consent at the time) girls who lure men into the dark alleys on a promise of prostituting themselves for a very low price, and then their boyfriend/pimp robs the man who was just counting his lucky stars. If he was very unlucky, he'd also get a bit of a beating and have his pants pulled down before being kicked back onto a busy street, as a mark of his shame. Every single account takes the view that these girls are the lowest of the low: not honest prostitutes, but 'bilkers'. Thus, in 1816 we can already see the seed of hypocrisy that would come to full flower during the ensuing century.
The Victorian quest for modernisation and sanitation cleared the Georgian slums and Victorian rookeries, sweeping away the very last of medieval London. The inhabitants slunk away, but not far, setting up home in Bermondsey, Brixton and Hackney, disturbing the Victorian gentry with their thieving, conniving, pawning and best of all, their bilking.
