The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (11 page)

An estimated 22,868 people were evicted as a result of the Cross Act. Most were from the poorest sectors of the population whose irregular income or home-based work made them ineligible for the smart new model dwellings that replaced their previous homes. Consequently, many became permanently homeless.

The Cross Act also proved to be a disaster for the Metropolitan Board of Works. Between 1875 and 1877, the Board purchased property to the value of over £1.5 million. However, when the demolished sites were sold on to the housing charities, little more than £330,000 was raised. Realising that they were never going to recoup their losses through the charities, the Board of Works refused to sell some sites for affordable housing. In Spitalfields, many of the demolished slum sites were reserved for commercial development in a bid to gain a better price for the land. Few developers were interested and, despite some warehousing being built, the area did not benefit from the relocation of any major employers. Thus, Spitalfields acquired yet more destitute, homeless individuals on a permanent basis. The landlords, who had already received fat compensation payments for the demolition of their slum properties must have rubbed their hands with glee.

By this time, overcrowding in Dorset Street was worse than ever before. Rooms no larger than 10 square feet became home to two, three or even four families. Sleeping could only be achieved if done in shifts, the other tenants either spending their time at work or in the pub. Despite their poverty, the tenants of these awful places did their best to give their children a decent start in life. Schools sprang up in even the most dangerous and overcrowded tenements, as evidenced by the report of Mr Wrack, a housing inspector from the Metropolitan Board of Works who visited Miller’s Court, Dorset Street in 1878.

On arriving in the court, Mr Wrack found that the ground floor of number 6 was being used as a school room during the day and a sleeping room at night. At the time of his visit there were 19 people in the 12 foot square room, namely 17 children, all under 7, the schoolmaster and his wife. This overcrowding, coupled with the fact that the room was directly adjacent to three privies and the communal dustbin, prompted Mr Wrack to deem the room an inappropriate place in which to educate children. He informed the schoolmaster of his findings and two days later the school was relocated.

By the closing years of the 1870s, Spitalfields resembled a bomb site. Large swathes of land in roads such as Goulston Street and Flower and Dean Street were a mess of bricks, mud and cement as developers built model dwellings for the housing charities. Other sites that had previously housed rookeries stood empty. Any private property-owners who could afford to sold up and moved out. Property values hit an all-time low. It was at this point that the area acquired a new generation of landlords. Most of these men had come from poor, working-class backgrounds. Some had come to London from Ireland during the famine. Others had lived in Spitalfields all their lives but had never before been presented with the opportunity to acquire property. All of them wanted to make money from housing the poor and destitute.

Most of the new landlords did not go into the business of running a registered common lodging house immediately. A preferred route to this goal was to initially secure the lease on a property and let it out on a weekly basis as furnished rooms. Rooms let in this manner had not been included in the regulations set out in the Common Lodging Houses Acts (only those let on a nightly basis had to be registered with the Police). This loophole allowed aspiring landlords to rent rooms with little interference from the authorities, just as long as they were prepared to trust their tenants for a whole week before they paid their dues.

Investing this amount of trust in tenants who were desperately poor was a risky business and nearly every slum landlord in London had experienced ‘bunters’: men and women who made a profession out of taking lodgings in which they stayed for some time before absconding without paying the rent. Henry Mayhew met with a ‘bunter’ named ‘Swindling Sal’ from New Cut in Lambeth who told him about ‘Chousing Bett’, a particularly notorious bunter: ‘Lord bless me, she was up to as many dodges as there was men in the moon. She changed places, she never stuck to one long; she never had no things to be sold up, and, as she was handy with her mauleys (fists), she got on pretty well. It took a considerable big man, she could tell me, to kick her out of a house, and then when he done it she always give him something for himself, by way of remembering her. Oh, they had a sweet recollection of her, some on’ them.’ Swindling Sal and her kind justified their actions through prejudice; making the sweeping generalisation that most lodging-house keepers subscribed to the Jewish faith (which was actually untrue), they reasoned that their victims ‘was mostly Christ-killers, and chousing (defrauding) a Jew was no sin’.

In order to protect themselves against losses incurred through bunters, landlords charged highly inflated rents so that the money paid by their honest tenants more than covered losses due to fraudulence. This practise earned them little respect from the more educated classes. Henry Mayhew himself described keepers of low lodging houses as ‘rapacious, mean, and often dishonest.’ This opinion was shared by many other social commentators of the era, and their criticism was not unjust. However, it should be borne in mind that had it not been for the existence of low lodging houses, the very poor (of which there were many) would have had nowhere else to go. Making money from the starving was certainly not a career to be proud of, but the virtual absence of any form of welfare for the very poor inevitably resulted in housing being created for profit. It could reasonably be suggested that the Government was the real villain of the piece.

Once they had gained control over their properties, the new Spitalfields landlords quickly became aware of the type of clientele from whom they could make the most money as a seemingly endless stream of prostitutes enquired after rooms to let. This state of affairs was by no means unusual. Indeed, Henry Mayhew suggested that ‘those who gain their living by keeping accommodation houses... are of course to be placed in the category of the people who are dependent on prostitutes, without whose patronage they would lose their only means of support.’

Chapter 14

Prostitution and Press Scrutiny

Despite its less than salubrious atmosphere, Dorset Street and the surrounding area was a good hunting ground for prostitutes as there was a large and mixed supply of punters. Spitalfields Market offered a regular supply of market workers and out-of-town traders. The Docks, with their never-ending supply of sex-starved sailors were well within walking distance and it even became fashionable for West End gentlemen to visit the area for an excursion known as ‘slumming’. Consequently, any woman finding it hard to make ends meet and able to disregard her self-respect, could earn money by plying her trade on the streets.

The landlords of lodging houses (particularly those not subjected to Police scrutiny) used prostitution to feather their own nests. Many acted as quasi-pimps; although they would not find punters for the girls, they would provide them with protection from the numerous gangs that prowled the streets extorting money from the street-walkers. These gangs usually comprised between three and ten youths. Most lived just outside the area they stalked. The Old Nichol estate, which lay just north of Spitalfields, spawned many of these gangs. The youths would walk down to Spitalfields in the evenings and generally make a nuisance of themselves, pestering elderly street-vendors and intimidating the local prostitutes from whom they would often extort money. However despite their frightening appearance, these gangs were comprised of cowards who only singled out those weaker than themselves for rough treatment. The appearance of one of the lodging-house doormen would usually send them packing. Consequently, the doormen became indispensable to the working girls.

Many of the local prostitutes were rather pathetic, gin-soaked women whose alcoholism had caused their families to abandon them many years earlier. Most were in their forties and possessed rapidly fading looks. They plied their trade on the streets, taking punters down the nearest alleyway for a quick knee-trembler. The lucky few managed to make enough money to hire their own room in one of the numerous courts. Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street was a perfect location for prostitutes. The fact that the court only had one exit meant that punters going in and out could be observed and the girls’ nightly intake could be easily assessed. Additionally, the proximity of the neighbouring rooms meant that the girls were afforded a much larger degree of mutual protection than they would have enjoyed had they resorted to doing their business out in the street.

The new landlords’ acquisition of property in the Dorset Street area really paid off in 1883 when the now rather aged Spitalfields Market began a phase of massive redevelopment. Over the next 15 years, the main market area acquired a new iron and glass roof and the old 17th-century buildings surrounding it were demolished. In their place, new buildings were built around the market area, including four blocks containing shops at street level, basements below and three-storey residential accommodation above. These new buildings still survive today at the eastern side of the market. The huge amount of building work at the market meant that, in addition to the traders and porters, masses of men involved in the building trade arrived in the area seeking somewhere cheap to sleep. Obviously, the streets closest to the market benefited the most from this sudden influx of workers and landlords of property in Dorset Street, Whites Row and Brushfield Street really reaped the benefits.

However, while the lodging-house keepers were busy cashing in on the development of Spitalfields Market, their properties and their dubious business activities were about to come under the spotlight of public scrutiny. Journalists decided it was time that the more educated classes got to know how the poor really lived. Soon a flurry of articles and pamphlets appeared, most of which dealt with the deplorable housing conditions suffered by the poor.

One of the first journalists to write about the issue was George Sims, who composed a series of articles for
Pictorial World
entitled ‘How The Poor Live’ early in 1883. Later the same year, he followed with a series called ‘Horrible London’ in the
Daily News.
In October 1883, William C. Preston, using the pseudonym Reverend Andrew Mearns, wrote ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, a 20-page penny pamphlet that highlighted the plight of the poor. The
Pall Mall Gazette
published a selection of passages from the pamphlet, including the following, rather prosaic tract that deals with conditions in lodging houses:

‘One of the saddest results of (this) overcrowding is the inevitable association of honest people with criminals. Often is the family of an honest working man compelled to take refuge in a thieves’ kitchen (referring to the shared facilities in the common lodging houses)... who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease?... Ask if the men and women living together in these rookeries are married and your simplicity will cause a smile. Nobody knows. Nobody cares... Incest is common; and no form of vice or sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention... The low parts of London are the sink into which the filth and abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow.’

Preston’s pamphlet started an avalanche of public comment but few of its readers actually took practical steps to improve matters. One man that did his utmost to make a difference was an East London vicar called the Reverend Barnett.

In the same year as Preston’s pamphlet was published, Barnett and a group of public-spirited investors formed the East London Dwellings Company with a view to buy, rehabilitate or rebuild on slum properties. Unlike the Metropolitan Board of Works, Barnett and his colleagues wanted to bring relief to the very poorest inhabitants of London. In return, investors would be able to sleep the sleep of the just, and receive 4% in dividend. Barnett’s idea proved to be more than just hot air and by 1886, the East London Dwellings Company had completed Brunswick Buildings in Goulston Street and Wentworth Buildings in Wentworth Street (previously one of the most run-down streets in Spitalfields). The success of these two schemes attracted other developers to the area including the banking family, Rothschild.

The Rothschilds had settled in the East End when they first arrived in Britain and had evidently not forgotten their roots. They purchased the land in Flower and Dean Street that had been demolished by the Metropolitan Board of Works and under the name of the ‘Four Per Cent Dwellings Company’ they built Rothschild Buildings. These developments housed over 200 Jewish families and although residents complained of bed bugs and overcrowding, the conditions were comparatively sanitary. The design of Rothschild Buildings was not unlike that of an army barracks and critics believed that these surroundings would make it impossible for a community to flourish.