The Eternal Slum

Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London

Anthony Wohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138535503
• eBook ISBN: 9781351304023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The problem of how, where, and on what terms to house the urban masses in an industrial society remains unresolved to this day. In nineteenth-century Victorian England, overcrowding was the most obvious characteristic of urban housing and, despite constant agitation, it remained widespread and persistent in London and other great cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool well into the twentieth century. The Eternal Slum is the first full-length examination of working-class housing issues in a British town. The city investigated not only provided the context for the development of a national policy but also, in scale and variety of response, stood in the vanguard of housing reform. The failure of traditional methods of social amelioration in mid-century, the mounting storm of public protest, the efforts of individual philanthropists, and then the gradual formulation and application of new remedies, constituted a major theme: the need for municipal enterprise and state intervention. Meanwhile, the concept of overcrowding, never precisely defined in law but based on middle-class notions of decency and privacy, slowly gave way to the positive idea of adequate living space, with comfort, as much as health or morals, the criterion.Not just dwellings but people were at issue. There is little evidence in this period of the attitude of the worker himself to his housing. Wohl has extensively researched local archives and, in particular, drawn on the vestry reports which have been relatively neglected. Profusely illustrated with contemporary photographs and drawings, this book is the definitive study of the housing reform movement in Victorian and Edwardian London and suggests what it was really like to live under such appalling conditions. This important study will be of interest to social historians, British historians, urban planners, and those interested in how social policies developed in previous eras.

1
Terra Incognita

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, London was still a city which one could easily walk across in three or four hours. From the Thames, a two-mile journey north or south would bring one to the outskirts of the built up area. From the most westerly to the most easterly district was about five miles. But by mid-century London had doubled its size, by absorbing existing communities and spreading along established or new paths of communication.¹ This physical growth was accompanied by an enormous expansion of the population. Already the most populous city in the world, London grew between 1801 and 1851 from under one million to about two and a quarter million inhabitants, and in each of those five decades it increased its population by at least seventeen per cent.² But such figures, coldly stated, cannot convey the bewildering speed and persistency with which the population spiralled. Every year the increment could be measured in tens of thousands; every decade London had to absorb a population equivalent to that of a large town. Between 1841 and 1851, for example, there was an addition of over 414,000 people. By way of comparison, the total population of Liverpool in 1851 was 375,955, and that of Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, 250,409, 232,841, and 172,270 respectively.³ This enormous demographic pressure was bound to create social distress; it lay at the heart of the housing question.

The growth in London’s population resulted from natural increase and immigration, roughly in equal measure. By mid-century rather less than half the residents in most working-class districts were native born Londoners.⁴ The mystique which London enjoyed as a city whose streets were paved with gold, and its rapidly expanding position as a banking, investment, commercial, and industrial centre, attracted a steady flow of artisans and labourers throughout the nineteenth century.⁵ ‘In the country one may get it [work], but in London one must get it’ was a phrase which summed up the expectations of thousands of migrants from the countryside.⁶ The existence of a growing and extensive market for unskilled labour, combined with the uncertain state of agricultural employment, served to swell the casual labour force in London. The result was even greater uncertainty of employment and, inevitably, low wages. Although the housing problem affected in some degree all levels of working-class life in London, its most persistent and bewildering aspect involved the casual labourers and their families, who comprised, it has been estimated, perhaps one family in ten.⁷ Later in the century, migrants from the countryside tended to settle in working-class suburbs, but in the first half of the century before the development of these suburbs, they naturally sought out the areas of lowest rents, and clustered around the already congested central districts close to the markets for casual labour.⁸

Although the amount of house building in London was substantial and the number of houses increased threefold between 1801 and 1851, it failed to keep pace with the growth of the population. Consequently the dwellings of the working classes became more and more overcrowded. Francis Place might urge labourers and artisans ‘to make almost any sacrifice to keep possession of two rooms however small’, but throughout London the labouring classes were being forced to accept one-roomed living as a norm.⁹ Dr John Liddle, the medical officer for the Whitechapel Poor Law Union, maintained in 1844 that ‘nearly the whole of the labouring population of Whitechapel and Lower Aldgate have only one room’; he described the indifference felt in such circumstances at the presence of a corpse, with the children playing and the family eating and sleeping around it.¹⁰ The concentration of the working classes in overcrowded rooms also worried Hector Gavin, a lecturer in forensic medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, who conducted house-to-house surveys of working-class areas. Gavin calculated that if all the windows and doors of the typical labourer’s tenement were shut tight, the maximum length of time a man could live before all the available oxygen would be consumed was seven hours. No wonder that he regarded these accommodations as black holes of Calcutta.¹¹ Intense overcrowding was reported throughout central London.¹² In Marylebone, for example, there existed a ‘large underground… population’, and by the middle of the century the pressure of overcrowding had driven thousands of ‘troglodytes’ and ‘human moles’ to live in underground cellar rooms.¹³

Greatly aggravating the overcrowding caused by demographic pressures and the insufficient supply of houses was the displacement of the working-class population in London. This was the consequence of dock construction, street improvement schemes, and the transformation of the City into a nonresidential district devoted to finance and commerce. These developments are discussed in the next chapter and it is sufficient here to note that, although these activities were greeted enthusiastically, they in fact created considerable hardships. The construction of the London docks, for example, resulted in the demolition of 1,300 houses, and that of St Katharine’s dock, finished in 1828, of another 1,033 working-class dwellings.¹⁴ In the first half of the century the City’s housing stock was reduced by some two and a half thousand houses, and the residents of the demolished dwellings had either crowded into the remaining houses or had moved a short distance away to dwell as close to their work as possible. Thus the density of inhabitants in the houses in the City and neighbouring districts increased considerably.¹⁵

At the root of the problem of overcrowding were complex economic factors. The price of building sites in central London, the economics of the building industry, the flow of capital into forms of investment more profitable than the building of working-class houses, the inability of low cost housing to compete with financial and commercial claimants for the use of central sites all combined to make the supply of housing inadequate to the demand and the rent structure one that encouraged subletting and overcrowding. The working-class predicament was compounded by uncertain employment and low wages. Even if the building industry had been equipped to handle the enormous demographic pressures upon it, and even if investment had been attracted into the field, the cost of centrally located building sites on the one hand and the level of wages on the other would still have resulted in the poor being priced out of the market. Hector Gavin in his Sanitary Ramblings (1848), found 12s. per week to be the average wage in Bethnal Green, and the going rate for two rooms to be between 35. 6d. and 45. a week.¹⁶ In the next chapter some sample working-class budgets are discussed. It is necessary only to point out here that for those earning under £1 a week a rent of 45. or so left no surplus for emergencies or savings after the barest essentials had been purchased. Large families aggravated the basic economic problem, for income from young children might buy enough food but never enough shelter. Given the prevailing level of rents and incomes it is little wonder that Gavin discovered most families occupying a single room or that he sometimes came across eight or more people in a room of 10’ by 6’. Gavin concluded in 1851 that ‘the poor pay in rent a very large proportion of their earnings, and that the sum they thus pay is greatly disproportioned to the accommodation provided for them’.¹⁷ But he was one of the very few to place housing within this basic economic context and, like his contemporaries, he failed to analyse the housing problem in the light of the distribution of income. Later in the century the economic forces making the slums were, as we shall see, examined closely, and construction costs, land values, rates of interest on capital borrowed for housing purposes, labour mobility and wages were all carefully scrutinized. But in the first half of the century overcrowding as a function of wages and rents, supply and demand (for both houses and labour), attracted almost no attention.

Indeed, in this early period the housing problem did not emerge as a clearly defined social issue at all. Partly this was a question of perception—not only of the underlying causes of overcrowding, but, more basically, of the very existence of overcrowding. To the general public London’s working-class districts remained a terra incognita down to the middle of the century. ‘As little was known about Bethnal Green’, complained one of its clergymen, as the ‘wilds of Australia or the islands of the South Seas.’¹⁸ By definition slums were somewhat hidden; it has been suggested that the word ‘slum’, which first appeared in Vaux’s Flash Dictionary in 1812, is derived from slumber, and came to mean a sleepy, unknown back alley.¹⁹ But for most of the nineteenth century not just the slums, but housing conditions throughout working-class London remained a mystery to the middle and upper classes as a whole, even though the various classes of society lived in much closer proximity to one another than was the case later in the century. In fact, some of the worst overcrowding was to be found in the mews tucked away behind the mansions of the rich, from Regent’s Park and St Marylebone to Westminster and the elegant reaches of Belgravia; the most wretched conditions often existed under the noses (quite literally) of the wealthy, and within short walking distance of the Houses of Parliament. The word ‘slum’ was first popularized, by Cardinal Wiseman, in a denunciation of the ‘congealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums’ close by Westminster Abbey.²⁰ In Household Words Dickens observed that ‘as the brightest lights cast the deepest shadows, so are the splendours and luxuries of the West End found in juxtaposition with the most deplorable manifestations of human wretchedness and depravity’, and he went on to stress that ‘the most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie beyond them’. But whatever the location of the overcrowding, whether in mews in fashionable London or in courts and alleys of working-class districts, the fact was that most Victorians were unaware of its existence. Only the criminal rookeries were general knowledge, and although the Statistical Society of London suggested that the intense overcrowding to be found in the most notorious of them, St Giles, was ‘but the type of the miserable condition of masses of the community’, they were regarded, both in fear and fascination, as aberrations far removed from the normal condition of the mass of’respectable’ poor.²¹

There are several reasons why the living conditions of the working man remained such a mystery to the middle and upper classes. Overcrowding, after all, was a domestic and intensely private state of affairs, hidden within the dwellings of the poor, and affecting the health mainly of those unfortunate enough to live in such circumstances—or so it was generally thought, despite the warnings of medical men. Contemporary attention was drawn far more to the readily apparent stench and filth of the streets, courts, and yards; these were highly offensive and a health hazard to all. The main concern of the day was the epidemics that ravaged society, and the current pythogenic theories of disease, which attributed fever to noxious gases and effluvia from decomposing faecal matter, together with Chadwick’s emphasis on engineering remedies, combined to draw attention from overcrowding within the home to drains and sewers outside it. Thus, for example, Gavin’s Sanitary Ramblings, though based on house-to-house visitation, was, as its title suggests, far more interested in sanitary facilities than in overcrowding or domestic arrangements. The same emphasis may be found in the registrar-general’s first annual report to which William Farr contributed as superintendent of the statistical department of the registrar-general’s office. Although Farr was later to be immensely valuable to the housing reform movement, in this report he passed uncritically over the wages, diet and accommodation of the poor and stressed t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Eternal Slum
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Terra Incognita
• 2 The Inexorable Tide
• 3 The Homes of the Heathen
• 4 The Weight of the Law
• 5 Preventive Machinery
• 6 Philanthropy at Five per cent
• 7 Benevolent Despotism
• 8 The Bitter Cry
• 9 A Certain Socialism
• 10 Housing in Committee
• 11 The Call of the Suburbs
• 12 The Stuff of Politics
• A Note on Sources
• Appendices
• Index