Ragged London E-Book

Michael Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ragged London describes life in the rookeries of London, where forty people would live together in one room. Although life was a constant struggle against famine, disease and violence, the people enjoyed a closeness that was more than the result of overcrowding. Their lives were lived entirely within the 'mean streets' of their little corner of London. They were born and raised within the rookeries, earned their meagre living there, enjoyed life as best they could, dressed in the latest fashion, got married, had children, died and were buried there. The lack of cooking facilities led to them inventing the takeaway, and there was absolutely no sanitation. In the poorest district of all, St Giles, only a single water pump serviced the entire population. It was a closed world, although the population explosion of nineteenth-century London led to millions of new arrivals in the already-congested rookery districts. The areas were lawless to a degree that dwarfs contemporary concerns about crime. Though life was cheap in the rookeries, they produced some of the best soldiers and sailors in the British armed forces.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

1. The Origins of the Rookeries

2. Home Life in the Rookeries

3. Work & Employment

4. Love & Marriage

5. Entertainment

6. Food & Drink

7. Crime & Punishment

8. The Story of St Giles-in-the-Fields

9. Saffron Hill & other London Rookeries

10. Philanthropy & Reform

11. The Destruction of the Rookeries

Conclusion

Appendix A: Medieval & Elizabethan Slums

Appendix B: Notable Residents

Appendix C: Population & Immigration

Appendix D: Principal Rookeries

Bibliography

Copyright

Children playing in the street. Family and community spirit were key in impoverished London.

INTRODUCTION

Ragged London deals with an area of British social history that has always been neglected. It studies the life and hard times of the London ‘submerged’ during the period when Britain experienced the greatest contrast between wealth and poverty it has ever known. In spite of that the ‘submerged’ people had a tremendous sense of community which Londoners have rarely experienced. Their world was bounded by three or four streets, yet within their narrow universe, they not only survived but even managed to be happy.

The ‘submerged’ people of London lived in areas that became known as ‘rookeries’. For three hundred years these districts were a byword for poverty, crime, squalor and disease. The conditions under which people eked out a precarious existence seem barely credible now. The people of the rookeries not only endured but managed to make a better life for themselves.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the area was unrivalled. The submerged people turned the most desperate conditions to their own advantage. They engaged in some of the most unpleasant, dangerous and poorly paid occupations of the time and still managed to earn a living for themselves and their families.

Most of the building work in London was carried out by the submerged, as well as the majority of railway building and track-laying. Long before middle-class females began to talk about having careers, the women of the rookeries worked themselves to the point of exhaustion. In their case it was not from choice but necessity, since it was almost impossible to support a family on the man’s wage alone. Even the children of the submerged worked, scavenged, begged and stole to make ends meet.

Crammed one hundred or so to a house, often forty to a room, and with only the most limited of facilities for washing or cooking, they struggled, endured and triumphed. The difficulties under which they laboured would have defeated the great captains of industry in Victorian times, yet they not only survived but even prospered to an extent. The average earning of a submerged family in the rookeries often compared favourably with those of other working-class families. Through their ingenuity and sheer dogged determination they epitomised the famous ‘bulldog’ spirit of the British people. They defeated Napoleon as their descendants were later to overcome Hitler.

In 1831 nearly a million people lived in the rookeries of London. They were both feared and despised by the authorities and only a few brave souls dared to champion their cause. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of their homes had been destroyed, and with them a way of life that had lasted three hundred years. This book tells their story.

1

THE ORIGINS OF THE ROOKERIES

The problem of the urban poor in London became an urgent political concern from the 1830s onwards. The main focus of the attack on poverty became concentrated on those areas known as ‘rookeries’. The term ‘rookery’ was first used to describe the dwellings of the London poor in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The earliest example of its use in print was by the poet George Galloway in 1792.

What was a rookery, and how did it differ from a simple slum? The Oxford English Dictionary defines rookeries as follows: ‘a cluster of mean tenements densely inhabited by persons of the lowest class.’ It was primarily overcrowding that distinguished a rookery from a slum. The fact that every part of the building from attic to cellar was inhabited earned its nickname – these dwellings were so called because of their imagined resemblance to the nests of rooks. Rooks live high up in the trees and gather together in vast numbers. In the same way, the human ‘rooks’ were crammed in to narrow spaces from basement to garret.

Experiments with a variety of plans designed to reduce poverty in London were carried out during the eighteenth century, and the proposal that found most favour with Victorian legislators was the workhouse system. This originated in the rookery of St Giles and tried to lead boys away from a life of crime and into productive employment. The problem of poverty became acute during the 1830s, and the generally adopted practice of ‘outdoor relief’ placed a serious financial strain upon the ratepayers of the poorer parishes, where the burden of poor rate expenditure was concentrated. The response of the government was to introduce a revised ‘Poor Law’ in 1834.

Under the new system, ‘outdoor relief’, while not formally abolished, was seriously curtailed. It was also hedged around with so many new restrictions and qualifications that the now mandatory ‘workhouse test’ drastically reduced the numbers applying to the parish for assistance. The architects of the new system declared proudly that this demonstrated that the majority of claimants under the old Poor Law were simply idle and impecunious and had no genuine basis for seeking assistance. Opponents of the workhouse challenged this argument fiercely. They pointed out that the conditions in them were so harsh and the process of applying to them for relief so degrading that many people preferred to seek help elsewhere. Family and friends, private charity, and of course criminal acts were preferred to ‘troubling the parish’.

Conditions in the workhouse were certainly made as inhospitable as possible. In an ironic editorial, The Times suggested sending applicants for poor relief to prison and placing criminals in the workhouse, remarking that it might be hard on the felons, but that at least they deserved punishment, whereas the people in the workhouse were guilty of no crime other than poverty.

The reasons for the rise in poverty between 1830 and 1900 are complex. One of the principal factors was the decline of traditional London industries, most notably the clothing and shoe trades. A further contributory factor was the rapid rise in rents following the collapse of the building trade after 1825. Coupled with the reluctance of landlords in a shrinking market to repair and renovate their properties, these led to a serious deterioration in the physical condition of homes. The result was that the middle classes began to move out of central London into the suburban areas. This in turn left a stock of formerly ‘genteel’ housing unoccupied. Landlords responded by letting out the vacant properties to lodgers. Soon multi-occupancy of buildings became the norm in inner London.

The new tenants were largely casual workers, for whom periodic and seasonal unemployment was an everyday reality. When around forty of them were crammed into a single room, it was inevitable both that their health suffered from the extreme living conditions and that the physical environment of their home deteriorated further.

The increasing overpopulation of the rookeries considerably disturbed the more thoughtful middle-class Londoners. Reformers called on Parliament to legislate against the overcrowding and squalid conditions but could not agree a satisfactory remedy for the problem. Some, notably Lord Shaftesbury, called for programmes of renovation. Others, again including Shaftesbury, favoured building ‘model dwellings’ for the poor. Some called for the restoration of outdoor relief, others for the outlawing of ‘middlemen’, and some for the total demolition of slum properties.

Those who opposed reform generally argued that Parliament had no business seeking to interfere with the rights of property, that the workhouse constituted adequate provision for the truly destitute, and that those who chose to live in the rookeries did so from a conscious preference for overcrowded and squalid conditions.

London had a history of slums dating back to the Middle Ages, but the metropolis then was a compact city with a small and stable population. Its geographical extent was confined to the City of London, the City of Westminster and Bankside in Southwark. There were small suburbs to the east and west of the City and Westminster.

The old slum areas in the City of London and its environs started to become overcrowded following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. The monks had provided education, care for the sick and maintained the poor from their charitable endowments and other income. The seizure of their assets by Henry VIII created severe problems for the London poor. People flooded into the city from the countryside looking for work. An agricultural depression and war with Scotland, with its accompaniments of men called up to fight and farms burned by raiding parties, added to the economic problems faced by rural workers. An influx of immigrants, particularly from Holland and France, added to the pressure on space, even though they settled, not in the City of London, but in the nearby suburbs. French hat makers moved into Southwark, Dutch, French and Belgian weavers to Spitalfields and Shoreditch, Dutch printers into Clerkenwell and Westminster, while the Belgians in Southwark introduced the brewing of beer with hops. This created a drink that was much stronger than the traditional ‘ale’ and which rapidly became very popular.

A map depicting Elizabethan London. The worst rookeries of the time were Newgate, Bridewell, East and West Smithfield, St Katherine’s by the Tower, Bankside, Clerkenwell and Cripplegate. As most of the land south of the river was owned by the Bishop of Southwark, development there was deliberately discouraged.

The increase in population also led to overcrowding, the rapid expansion of slum areas and multi-occupancy of dwellings. The foundations of the rookeries were laid, but it was nearly another hundred years before true rookeries arose in London.

The continuing expansion of London concerned the authorities to such an extent that in 1580 Queen Elizabeth I issued a proclamation forbidding any new building in the metropolis. The result was to increase overcrowding within the areas already heavily populated. It also led to a considerable expansion of the suburban areas immediately outside the city.

Far from improving the situation, this led to a considerable deterioration in housing conditions. The extreme overcrowding, made much worse as a result of the royal proclamation, was at least a contributory factor to the high death rate in London. During the Great Plague of 1665, over 100,000 Londoners died, 15,000 of them within the walls of the City of London.1

It was not until the Great Fire of London in 1666 that the old slum areas of London were finally swept away. Though most of the City was rebuilt over the next few years, the government took care to prevent the creation of any new slums in the area. They also tried to remove as many of the existing ones as possible.

The entire population of London was evacuated during the fire, and found shelter in the surrounding areas – Moorfields (now Moorgate), Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Hatton Garden, Covent Garden and St Giles. Soon all these places were full of people and the homeless Londoners moved further afield, as far as Highgate and Islington. Tents were set up on open ground and refugees from the fire camped out for miles around. The fire made almost 80,000 Londoners homeless. Many of them had relied upon the income from letting out their homes to tenants and were now forced to appeal for public charity. The strain on charitable resources was enormous.

The owners of those buildings in the City that had survived the fire seized the opportunity to raise rents. According to one contemporary estimate, rents increased by 90 per cent; according to the more reliable evidence of Pepys, a civil servant, the rise was around 40 per cent. Many of the poor managed to return to their former homes in the City, but the majority were forced to move out. Clerkenwell, Holborn, St Giles, Shadwell, Stepney, Whitechapel and Wapping became full of refugees from London. The result was that the neighbourhoods turned into new slums and, within a short time, new rookeries.

It is difficult to overestimate the effect of the fire on the growth of London. In time the city would have expanded naturally, but the fire accelerated the process. When most of the City of London lay in ruins, finding a home in other areas became a necessity. Even when it had eventually been rebuilt, most of those who had moved out remained where they were. They had found new dwelling places, new sources of employment, new and better roads than the narrow and congested streets of the City. In addition, the new homes that were built in the City of London were far more expensive than the old ones had been. They were also, even if more fire-resistant, still liable to sudden and unexpected collapse. As the wealthy for the most part had also decided to migrate en masse to the West End, a whole new area of employment opportunities opened up.

Eighteenth-century builders.

Tradesmen, formerly shackled by the tight regulations of the guilds and livery companies, found that they could operate on a more straightforwardly commercial basis. Instead of being the throbbing and vibrant heart of England, as it once was, the City of London became a ghost town. It remained the financial capital of the country, but as an area in which to live, it was no longer viable. Even before the fire, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Hatton Garden and Spitalfields had begun to take away the traditional City trades of goldsmiths and silversmiths, jewellers, woodworkers, and even tailoring. Cripplegate remained the strongest area for gold and silverwork, but it too was technically outside the control of the City of London.

With the sudden opportunities for new building, property speculators sprang up. Perhaps the most flamboyant of them was Nicholas Barbon, whose extraordinary life and behaviour surprised even his contemporaries. Barbon bought up land after the fire and covered every available space with housing. The quality of his workmanship was poor, even by the standards of his day, and his methods of operation defied belief. If the owners of existing properties refused to sell their homes to him, he simply got his workmen to pull down their houses. For almost thirty years he was constantly involved in lawsuits, but was so adept at finding loopholes, at delaying proceedings, at appealing and counter-appealing, that he was rarely called to account for any of his actions. Instead of taking out loans to finance his development, he relied entirely upon non-payment of bills. His creditors spent years in costly litigation. He was no better at paying the rents on land that he had leased, being perpetually in arrears and refusing to honour his debts.

Not surprisingly, the quality of his homes was substandard. Unlike most builders in London, he ignored the new regulations, except as regards building in brick rather than wood. Some of his more successful undertakings, like Essex Street, Buckingham Street, Lincoln’s Inn, New Square and Bedford Row, still survive. Most, though, collapsed completely only a few years after they were built. He died in 1698, regretted by none. The contemporary observer Narcissus Luttrell gave an amusing account of a skirmish between the lawyers of Gray’s Inn and some of Barbon’s workmen:

Dr Barbon, the great builder, having some time since bought the Red Lion fields near Gray’s Inn walks to build on, and having for that purpose employed several workmen to go on with the same, the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn took notice of it and, thinking it an injury to them, went with a considerable body of a hundred persons upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen and threw bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again. So a sharp engagement ensued, but the gentlemen routed them at last and brought away one or tow [sic] of the workmen in Gray’s Inn. In this skirmish one or tow [sic] of the gentlemen and servants of the house were hurt, and several of the workmen.2

Two years after Barbon’s death, the once compact City of London had swallowed up Holborn, Clerkenwell, the Strand, Whitehall and Shoreditch. Further east, Stepney, Whitechapel, Wapping and Limehouse were also becoming densely populated suburbs. Bankside to the south of the river expanded rapidly. The City of London was still full of empty houses and even the business districts had not yet recovered from the fire. Elsewhere in London, by contrast, the constant expansion westwards and eastwards continued relentlessly.

The writer John Evelyn cried out in astonishment:

To such a mad intemperance was the age come of building in the city, by far too disproportionate already to the nation: I having in my time seen it almost as large again as it was within my memory.3

The frenzy of speculative building by Barbon and others of his kind finally persuaded Parliament that uncontrolled development in London could not continue. In spite of the new regulations that had been introduced after the fire, not only were the new homes collapsing with alarming frequency but smaller fires continued to break out in them.

The beginning of the eighteenth century saw further Acts of Parliament introduced to improve the standards of new buildings. Although they still permitted numerous unsafe structures to be constructed, they at least drastically reduced the risks from fire. The most important features of the new building regulations were to prohibit the then fashionable wooden eaves that jutted out from so many buildings in London. These were now hidden behind a parapet and covered up with brick or stone. It was also illegal to have wooden frames flush with the outer walls. These now had to be set back further, into the brickwork itself, with one side of the corner bricks now exposed.

The economy of London was buoyant between 1700 and 1750. This was a magnet for migrants from other parts of Britain and Europe, attracted by labour shortages and the opportunity to earn better money than was possible at home. Available property for rent was difficult to find, so landlords crammed houses from top to bottom with lodgers. The living conditions were overcrowded, but there was no shortage of people renting space in a rookery house. No public housing provision existed, and the cheapness of the lodgings meant that those living on subsistence wages could always find a bed for the night.

The lack of transport made it essential for people to live within walking distance of their jobs. Those who lived in St Giles were near the West End and its great houses, with its consequent opportunities for employment in domestic service. They were also near the Covent Garden market, where many of them became stallholders. The people in the East End were near the jetties where ships and boats loaded and unloaded their cargoes. They were also near the City of London, where they carried out a variety of jobs from clerical to manual. London south of the river was largely confined to the Bankside area of Southwark, primarily noted for its pubs, prostitutes and bear-baiting. West London was hardly developed at all, remaining a primarily rural region.

Until about 1815 the living conditions in the rookeries remained fairly constant. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars a building boom followed. The result was not only the rapid expansion of London but also the creation of entirely new rookeries. The first of these was Agar Town on the site now occupied by St Pancras station. North London soon saw two more rookeries arise, one the Battlebridge area around King’s Cross and the other the new estate of Somers Town. South London saw the areas of Nine Elms and Lambeth arise from what, only ten years previously, had been sleepy Surrey villages. West London spawned two entirely new rookeries, Notting Dale and the Potteries of North Kensington. In the East End, the existing rookeries expanded and grew with the rise of the new docks, while the eastern districts of London also began to encroach upon the villages and suburbs of Essex. Soon places like Canning Town turned into new rookeries.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the poor managed to eke out a subsistence level at worst. They could still eat, drink and dress well during the early nineteenth century. They might not have lived on the same level as the wealthy or even the middle classes, but they lived well enough. The years between 1830 and 1880 were perhaps the harshest time for the poor in the entire history of London. From the 1830s onwards, with the new and more repressive attitude towards those who were casually employed, poverty became an abiding reality for the dwellers in the rookeries. It was under the Victorians that Londoners starved.

Victorian entrepreneurs and legislators alike saw the inhabitants of the rookeries as simply a danger and a problem to be eradicated. The general perception of them by the authorities was that they were drunken, lazy, criminal and sexually promiscuous. The people who lived in the rookeries came to be described as ‘the great unwashed’, or, by more sympathetic commentators, ‘the submerged’. Marx and Engels, living in London themselves, referred to them as the ‘lumpen proletariat’.

The founders of Marxism saw no alternative to violent revolution, though both believed that the ‘underclass’ was utterly incapable of revolt. The philanthropists believed that new housing and better living conditions would transform the people and make them able to hold their own with the other sections of society.

Factors adding to the overcrowding in rookery neighbourhoods were the transformation of the City of London from a residential area to a primarily commercial district and also, crucially, the arrival of the railways in London. The effects of both these changes are studied in detail in later chapters of this book.

The people of the rookeries laboured under intense disadvantages yet showed no desire to move away. There were three principal reasons why they chose to remain in the slums. The first was simply familiarity, the sense of community within the rookeries being intense and compounded by the fact that many families had lived there for hundreds of years. Secondly, there was the need to live close to their sources of employment, a factor that affected casual workers even more than those in regular occupations. Finally, there was no realistic means of escape for them. They could afford neither the rents in the new suburbs nor the transport costs to move out there and travel in to their places of work, so were forced to remain where they were.

Having sketched the origins of the rookeries, we shall now turn our attention to studying the way of life of the people who lived in them, as well as examining the worst examples in greater detail. The primary focus will be upon St Giles-in-the-Fields, most notorious of all the rookery areas, so much so that it was often referred to simply as ‘the’ rookery. Other areas are studied in less detail, most attention being devoted to Saffron Hill, the second worst rookery. Briefer descriptions are also given of other rookeries in London.

Notes

1 C.C. Knowles & P.H. Fitt, The History of Building Regulations in London, Architectural Press, 1972.

2 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation Of State Affairs, 1857. Luttrell’s observations relate to an incident on 10 June 1684.

3 John Evelyn, Diary.

2

HOME LIFE IN THE ROOKERIES

London in about 1600 was not only the largest but also one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in the world. Its poets and playwrights were globally renowned. Men like Drake and Raleigh were not only discovering new countries but also laying the foundations of the British Empire. Elizabethan London was a place of ceaseless activity; the sailors who fought the Spanish brought home vast treasures to the capital, the merchants on the exchange dealt in the new goods and new industries and new commercial opportunities grew rapidly.

The streets swarmed with the constant press of people. New and exotic products were landed in the docks and began to appear in the shops and on the tables of the citizens. Even the people themselves were caught up in the excitement and the sense that the Elizabethan age represented a new era for England, the beginnings of greatness for the country.

It was in this climate of optimism and prosperity that St Giles turned from a village into a suburb of London. The rookery might have been a slum but it felt like a New Town and not a Third World shanty town. There were no shacks built of tin or wood, no open campsites in the fields. Even the poor in London still lived in houses. There was a small number of people who slept rough, in brick-kilns, shop fronts and similar structures. Even so, the proportion of rough sleepers and vagrants actually declined dramatically between 1640 and 1800.1 It was not until the Victorian period that homelessness once more became a problem on the streets of London, but even the poor in St Giles were not as poor as their counterparts in foreign cities. The conditions in which they lived might have been unpleasant, but they compared very favourably with those of Paris, Berlin, Vienna or Moscow at that time.

St Giles-in-the-Fields.

Apart from the constant noise and bustle, one of the first things that a visitor to St Giles (or indeed almost any part of London) would have noticed was the quite extraordinary smell pervading the air. Almost every visitor to the city remarked upon the stench of the streets. It was a heady brew of leather from the tanning factories, brick-dust from the kilns, rotting vegetation, rain upon the stones, beer being brewed and bread baked, tallow fat being burnt to produce candles, to say nothing of ‘greasy cooks at sweating work’ and ‘stinking breaths and uncleanly carcasses’.2 In addition, there were the unwholesome exhalations from graveyards, the presence everywhere of manure and faeces and, above all, the pervasive smell of smoke. Not only did the almost incessant burning of coal poison the atmosphere of London but it also covered the city in a semi-permanent pall of fog. Meteorologists of the time began to refer to the phenomenon of ‘great stinking fog’.3

Although the living conditions were squalid and dangerous, the actual environment in which the dwelling places were set was one of the most magnificent in London, if not the world. Not far away, Hyde Park and other open spaces gave the growing city ‘lungs’. These were open to the public and many of the St Giles folk enjoyed promenading in them. Inigo Jones’ stunning Piazza in Covent Garden was one of the wonders of the world, admired by generations of Londoners. That too was open for anyone who chose to walk within it.

Under James I, the restrictions on renovation and new building in the city were relaxed slightly. Expansion was still forbidden, but green fields and large houses within London slowly began to vanish. They were replaced by smaller and cheaper brick-gabled houses. In the suburbs of St Giles, still outside the area of London altogether, new homes for the poor were built. As late as 1595 St Giles was still largely a sleepy village. The next twenty years saw an explosion of building.

The contrast is clearly shown on an examination of the Assessment Books of St Giles in 1623. This document lists no fewer than 897 houses in the area. It also breaks down the pattern of development to an extent, stating that there were:

47 houses, exclusively of six courts or alleys branching from them into Aldewych West, all of which ground was until nearly that time unbuilt on. And at Town’s End, which lay to the west of the church, there are enumerated thirty-eight housekeepers, besides those in Rose and Crown Yard, on the same site, which amounted to eleven more.4

The same source also gives the names of the courts and alleys, together with the number of housekeepers:

HOUSEKEEPERS

5

Paviours Alley

35

Black Beare Yard

29

Greyhounde Alley

10

Swanne Alley

35

Canter’s Alley

22

Town’s End, and Rose and courtyard as before

Middle Row

26

Twenty courtyards and alleys were built in the area between 1595 and 1622. No fewer than 100 houses were built on the north side of St Giles High Street alone.6 The homes were certainly not on the same level of quality as the houses being built for the rich, but on the other hand they were nowhere near as bad as some of the slums in the City of London that were left over from the Middle Ages. All in all they represented a reasonable standard of accommodation for the new influx of poor people coming to London.

The city was going through one of its periodic property booms. Land and houses had become such valuable commodities that ditches were filled in and built upon. Roads were turned into dwelling-places and alleys constructed in the narrow areas where there was no space to build any more ambitious homes. Even when there was no possibility of building outwards any more, extra upper storeys were added, ‘oversailing’ (to use a contemporary term) the alleys and passages.

London before 1615 had been built by generations of workers in the craft guilds of masons and carpenters. The role of an architect was essentially to follow tradition rather than to create a new vision. Then, in 1615, James I appointed Inigo Jones as Royal Surveyor. At first Jones simply worked on public commissions, but in 1630 the Earl of Bedford wanted to build upon the land behind his house on The Strand. For the first time a major private development in London became subject to planning controls.7

The result of Jones’ work on the earl’s estate was the new Covent Garden. The sheer impressiveness of its revolutionary construction and the new opportunities for employment that it suddenly afforded led to yet more people flocking to the nearby village of St Giles. During the 1630s the population of the area doubled, from 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. In the mid-sixteenth century, the population of the entire West End had only been about 1,500. By 1600 it had reached 3,000, and by 1640, had climbed as high as 18,500.Adding in the inhabitants of St Giles, we see a phenomenal surge in population for the area.8

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 led to a gradual relaxation of planning controls. By the early 1660s Bloomsbury was already starting to become a suburb of London. St Giles, though still a slum, benefited from the return of Royalist nobles from exile. Many of them chose to settle and build new homes in the area. In the 1664 poll tax register, for example, less than 20 per cent of the population was too poor to pay. The district of St Margaret’s, Westminster, by contrast, produced a figure of 47.4 per cent of the population exempted from the tax.9 There was also some evidence of the area actually becoming more prosperous after the Restoration. The number of pensioners in the area was comparatively high, almost double the proportion in St James Clerkenwell, for example.10

The effect of the Great Fire of London in 1666 was to destroy the old slum areas of the City. Naturally this also offered openings for casual labourers, since there was now a sudden and urgent demand for building workers. After the fire the entirely new development of Seven Dials was built. This linked St Giles to St Martin-in-the-Fields and laid the foundations of what was to become in time one continuous stretch of rookery. The nobility, sensing new opportunities to make money, began to remove their palaces from The Strand and replace them with terraced houses for the poorer citizens.

The principal effect of this was to allow the rise of the property developer. These people, especially in the period from 1670 to 1720, were largely opportunists whose sole concern was to make money quickly. Since safety and quality cost money, they did not figure on the agenda of these speculators. Vast fortunes were made by men whose character was often not simply dubious, but positively criminal.

In St Giles and areas like it, shoddy tenements were jerry-built as quickly as possible and packed full of residents. Every available space from cellar to attic was taken up with tenants: whole families lived and worked in these dark, damp and airless dwellings. Gardens vanished as they were built over and turned into squalid ‘courts’. Even if (as happened frequently) poor workmanship led to the injury or even death of the occupants, the landlords were not responsible and no compensation was paid. Flooded cellars were a particularly frequent cause of death, since so many people in St Giles lived in basements. These were generally entered through trap-doors set in the pavement. A ‘St Giles cellar’ became an expression for the worst possible kind of living accommodation. During the Middle Ages they had been used as storage areas, shops or even burial vaults; now they became people’s homes.

The houses were constructed with one room at the front and one at the back, a passage and staircase on one side of the rooms. Each floor would have the same arrangement of rooms, however high the dwelling. Until the new building regulations of 1707 it was normal for wooden eaves-cornices to be a prominent feature of houses. Then they were made illegal and parapet walls introduced to hide them.11

It was also not at all uncommon for bad roofing to lead to the death of passers-by from falling slates or masonry. At about the same time as the outlawing of the wooden cornices, the fashion in windows changed from casements to sash windows.

The rapid development of St Giles can be seen by comparing the figures from the 1623 assessments with later statistics. By 1685, there were 2,000 houses in the area; by 1710 the number was 3,000; by 1801, the date of the first census, 3,861; in 1811, the census records 4,828 houses. This represents an increase of almost 1,000 houses over a ten-year period.12

In some ways the Great Fire of London actually improved the quality of life for people in St Giles and other rookeries. Before 1666 the new houses for the poor were extremely badly built. They not only lacked the most basic facilities but were also positively dangerous. In the event of fire they were death-traps, but the structure of the buildings was so bad that they were hazardous to live in at all.

After the fire, new building regulations were drawn up. Under the new laws all houses had to be built of brick and stone. Four classes of accommodation were drawn up, ranging from houses for nobility to homes for the poor. They also had to have windows and proper roofs and even walls of reasonable thickness. The degree of thickness depended on the class of the property.13

The new homes, though built of solid brick and with walls far thicker than their predecessors, were dark and airless. The large numbers of people who lived in them also made them dirty, squalid and unhealthy before long. The new houses might have had windows but the glass inside them did not last long. It was very early in their existence that the windows were broken and left open to the elements. The landlords made no attempt to repair or replace them, so the tenants and lodgers would simply hang up rags at the windows as the best way to keep out the cold and the rain.

Doors too soon decayed and eventually disappeared altogether, either through lack of maintenance or else because they were deliberately destroyed for firewood. Since the people in the lodgings had nothing to steal, locked or closed doors were hardly necessary. In spite of these and many other hazards, people continued to flood into St Giles and the other rookeries.

Landlords, aristocratic and otherwise, profited immensely from the continual influx of people into the areas. A speculator would buy up a whole street and then sublet each house in turn to landlords, or, as they were known in the language of the time, ‘housekeepers’. These housekeepers in turn would let off individual rooms within each house and the tenant of the room in his or her turn would sublet areas of the room to other occupants. The result, unsurprisingly, was overcrowding on a scale never seen previously. As there was constant influx of new people into the city, the demand for even the most insalubrious accommodation meant that anyone who had a room could make good money. Anyone with a house could become positively rich.

During this period, a housekeeper would pay a sum of between £3 and £25 per year for each house he leased, depending on the area. He would then sublet the house to lodgers who would pay between 6d and 10s 6d per week. In St Giles at this time a rented room would cost around a shilling a week, or £2 a year. Poor tenants would maximise their own income and reduce their costs by subletting their own room in turn to other lodgers. Single women or widows were particularly prone to sharing their room with other females. As can be seen from the above sums, a housekeeper who paid £3 a year for a house in, say, St Giles could expect to do pretty well out of it. Even in a three-roomed house he would clear double his initial investment. Most homes in St Giles were larger than that, so the return on his outlay was very good indeed.14

On the other hand there was no ‘rack-renting’. Tenants could rent a space for as little as 1d a day in some quarters. The average amount of money spent in rent in proportion to wages was about a tenth of the tenant’s income. Since rents were low it was possible for poor people to live reasonably well in the rookeries at that time.15

The living conditions might have been unpleasant but nobody went without food or clothing. Life in the rookery was tough, but it was certainly not as bad as it became later. Wages were comparatively high, rents low, and food was plentiful and cheap. Compared with either the Elizabethan or Victorian periods, this was, relatively speaking, a ‘golden age’ for the poor.

The lack of space and massive overcrowding in almost every house in the St Giles area made cooking meals extremely difficult. The result was an explosion of restaurants, public houses and other eating-places. Among one of its more unacknowledged claims to fame, St Giles can fairly be said to have invented the takeaway!

Another problem within the homes was washing. Water came from a single pump and was stored in jugs and bowls for use later. There would only be one tap within the house and access to it among such overcrowding was difficult. The result was that most people, especially in St Giles, used the public baths.