It’s the little details that grab you in Jerry White’s magnificent prequel to his Wolfson History Prize-winning ‘London in the Twentieth Century’. Over 56,000 mostly working-class Londoners were displaced by the building of the railways between 1853 and 1884. In the early 1880s, in St Stephen Street off Tottenham Court Road, 97 people shared two WCs. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers’ demand for sex was so great that in each riverside tavern at Shadwell you could expect to find as many as 200 prostitutes. In the 1830s, cats were skinned alive in the streets for their fur.
Of course, there was another side to Victorian London, and White gives due space to high-society balls, technological advances like Bazalgette’s sewage system and ‘civilising influences’ like the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which did much to curb illiteracy. But it’s the poverty, squalor and overcrowding that stand out – inevitably, for as White points out, it was under Victoria that the extreme social contrasts long inherent in London life finally became intolerable. He confronts the slums head-on – the ‘Old Mint’ near Borough High Street with its oozing pools of sewage (‘an alsatia for thieves, prostitutes, debtors, beggars and outlaws’); the notorious Covent Garden rookery ‘Little Dublin’; and of course Flower & Dean Street in Spitalfields, ‘the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis’.
As fans of his excellent ‘Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920’ know, White has always dealt in grass-roots social history. What makes this new book so compulsively readable is the attention it pays to adverts and street slang and newspaper titbits and oddball memoirs like the pseudonymous Walter’s sex diary ‘My Secret Life’. If its diffuse structure obscures any grand thesis, perhaps that’s because White is more comfortable letting his lovingly assembled facts speak for themselves. Charged with infectious enthusiasm for its subject, this is an unmissable treat which ought to be top of every Londoner’s reading list.
