London in the
Nineteenth
Century

The Mint, 1813

I

THE MINT: OLD LONDON,
1800–1855

London, 1800

There is no spot like this in the neighbourhood of London, – no spot that looks so murderous, so melancholy, and so miserable. Many of these houses are very large, and very old; many of these courts stand just as they were when Cromwell sent out his spies to hunt up the Cavaliers … [Y]ears have gathered over this gloomy spot, blackening the steep roofs, and leaving them in all the decay and solitude of silence and neglect. Some of them have slumbered in Chancery, until the very moths have eaten away the names of the original possessors, – until the title-deeds can no longer be deciphered; for there is now no living being to be found, either to claim the titles, or pay the costs.¹

THIS ‘spot’ was the ‘Mint’ or ‘Old Mint’, Southwark, just west of Borough High Street and a ten-minute stroll from London Bridge. It was a place of ‘dilapidated-looking buildings’, many ‘uninhabited, unroofed, and in ruins’, others ‘shored up on all sides by huge timbers’ stretching from ‘blackened walls to the road’ or across the narrow streets or even, like some vast wooden claw, up one side of a tottering house, over the roof and down the other. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this ground had been partly covered by a noble mansion, Suffolk House. Henry VIII had chosen a wing of it in which to mint coin. But that was demolished in the early years of Elizabeth, leaving nothing but names – the Old Mint, Mint Street, Suffolk Place, Great Suffolk Street – to mark its gilded youth. Much of what replaced it was over 200 years old in 1800. Some ‘fine old mansion’ might survive, squatting ‘like a drunken giant by the wayside’. One late-seventeenth-century ‘manor house’ – the Farm House in Harrow Street – carried on its business as a common lodging house for generations, and so did another called the Red House. In and around these great hulks, and behind the three-storey old-iron and sheep’s-head shops on the main streets, their bulging leaded bay windows and dormers and great eaves overhanging the ground floors, were the narrow courts and alleys built up in the backlands, some houses still of timber, many with just two rooms, one on top of the other. Almost everything here was ‘mouldering with age’: when two houses in Lombard Street fell down in May 1814 they killed four of their occupants in the collapse.

This was no tiny enclave. It contained in 1820 some 3,000 families, 1,040 houses, a dozen streets and a maze of courts and alleys behind them. Here the land lay below the high-water mark of the Thames, less than half a mile away to the north. Any drainage was in ditches or ‘open sewers’ and cesspools. And so ‘the sewage in many places bubbles up through the floors’, ‘oozing … through the pavement of the courts’. The houses were ‘almost destitute of water’, ‘there was no boarding on the floors’ and ‘the inmates slept on the earth, on a few shavings generally’. Small wonder that when cholera first came to London, at the beginning of 1832, it chose the Mint as its earliest and most devastated district. Small wonder, too, that the Mint had traditionally been an alsatia for thieves, prostitutes, debtors, beggars and outlaws, a labyrinthine hidey-hole which bailiffs and police dared not penetrate except in force. In the Mint, ‘We seem to have left civilisation behind us’: ‘every by-court and alley is choking with filth, vice, and crime’.²

Throughout the nineteenth century, with the Mint as one quintessential instance, old London was bad London. Old London epitomised decay, squalor, poverty, disease and disorder. It cluttered, threatened, stank, demoralised, infected, offended the eye. There were, for nineteenth-century Londoners, almost no saving graces in old London, and so virtually nothing worthwhile to be saved of it. Old London and its ways had to be overpowered and obliterated.

Yet what a task. For in 1800 there was so much of it, clustering round the cities of London and Westminster like some ulcerous growth.

We might take a tour, starting in the far south-west. Close to the river was the notorious slum near Westminster Abbey centred on the Almonry, Orchard Street, and Old and New Pye Streets. It lay next to Tothill Fields, on the very edge of London in 1800, and many knew it as the ‘Devil’s Acre’. Caxton had lived in the Almonry and houses there were thought to date back to his time. Further north were two old pockets of notoriety around St Martin-in-the-Fields at the west end of the Strand and Swallow Street at the east end of Piccadilly. To the west came St Giles, most notorious of all, a City suburb of the 1670s. By 1800 this was the ‘Rookery’, ‘Little Dublin’, ‘Little Ireland’ or the ‘Holy Land’ (an ironic comment on the faithfulness of its obstreperous Irish population to priestcraft). Perched at the eastern end of Oxford Street, even then a fashionable shopping centre for the west end of town, St Giles was an ever-present risk to the shopper, the wagoner or the parcel-carrier. Nearby lay Seven Dials and the streets off Drury Lane. Then the Clare Market area, from High Holborn to the Strand and even down to the river, a nest of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century streets, courts and alleys with an evil reputation: a popular legend claimed that an unlucky wayfarer had entered Portugal Street on his way to the Strand and had never emerged, his ghost still searching for a way back to civilisation.³

Still moving east, touching the north-west border of the City, lay the teeming thieves’ quarter of Saffron Hill, Chick Lane and Field Lane, at the back of the stinking River Fleet: freshly washed silk handkerchiefs, loot from an army of pickpockets, would hang on poles and lines across Field Lane as thick as oak leaves in summer. Then the impenetrable nest of courts and alleys around Turnmill Street, Clerkenwell, which contained Jack Ketch’s Warren. South of this came Smithfield, older than St Giles or Saffron Hill and hardly more respectable: scarcely, too, with its barbaric cattle market, less filthy. Then, moving east again, the old and very poor area between Barbican and Whitecross Street and Golden Lane, St Luke’s.

Bishopsgate and Shoreditch, the ancient road to Cambridge at the eastern edge of the City, marked the beginnings of the ‘east end of the town’. Along this old highway, from Shoreditch to the river, were a mass of overgrown villages grafted to London mainly in the seventeenth century, still with some housing predating the Great Fire of London of 1666. In the north lay the ragged ‘Old Nichol’, the Nichol Street district of Shoreditch and south-west Bethnal Green. South of that Spitalfields and the thieves’ quarter around Flower and Dean Street, Wentworth Street and Rose Lane: here Petticoat Lane was the eastern distribution centre for stolen goods, as Field Lane was further west. South of that, Whitechapel, where scores of slaughterhouses added to the mayhem, and with a warren of lawless courts and alleys around Rosemary Lane and East Smithfield. Between that and the Thames was squeezed the poor river-plunderers’ district of St Katharine’s-by-the-Tower. And east from here, along the river to the marshes of the Isle of Dogs, stretched the sailors’ towns that had edged out from London with the growth of the port from Elizabeth’s time: Wapping on the foreshore, Ratcliffe to the north of that and Shadwell to the east.

South of the river, London was many times smaller than on the great north bank. In the east lay the wharfside district of Redriff or Rotherhithe, which, though straggling eastwards, clung tightly to the river. West of that were Horsleydown and Bermondsey, where an inlet of the river at St Saviour’s Dock brought a tidal flow into ditches around Jacob’s Island. Here ancient part-wooden houses had their back walls propped on stilts, their occupants drawing water in buckets from the filthy ooze below. West of Bermondsey came the old Borough, connected to London since Roman times by London Bridge. The district east of Borough High Street had been largely devastated by the Great Fire of Southwark in 1676, though it was quickly rebuilt (the Mint to the west had been spared, thanks to the prevailing wind). Flood, too, was an enemy. At high tides the Thames crept into the courts and alleys, filling basements and swamping ground floors to knee height and more, families having to be rescued by boat. Apart from the ancient fishermen’s and watermen’s district along Fore Street, Lambeth, old London on the Surrey side, virtually ended just west of the Mint.⁴

So this great ruinous ring of old London was extensive enough. Throughout the nineteenth century it would give all sorts of trouble. We shall have cause to be drawn back to these places time and again when writing of London in the century to come.

But it’s also important to stress that in 1800 much of London was not old at all. Even in its historic heart, the City had largely been rebuilt in the 1670s and 1680s. And the streets built then had more often than not been touched up or rebuilt since as fresh fires or the pressing needs of trade required demolition and replacement. The houses in Cornhill, for instance, new-built after the Great Fire, ‘are all in a more modern stile’, the old houses destroyed by ‘the many fires which have happened at different periods on both sides of the street’.⁵ Fire would continue to be a potent force for reconstruction throughout the century to come. It was one reason why old London was in fact newer than the maps alone would indicate.

Even more important, since 1666 London had grown vigorously on all sides, most especially in the west. In this ‘west end of the town’ several great new towns had been added to the capital in a giant push westward as aristocratic family landholdings were exploited for development. Bloomsbury, on the Bedford Estate, was begun at the end of the seventeenth century and had been building northwards and westwards to Tottenham Court Road ever since. Soho, always more plebeian and cosmopolitan than its polite neighbour on the east, contained London’s artists’ quarter and was a centre of artisanal, bohemian and cultural life. It had been largely completed by 1720. To the west of Soho and some thirty years younger, Mayfair on the Grosvenor Estate had been developed by 1750 right up to Hyde Park (London’s western boundary for the whole of the eighteenth century). So that huge district between Oxford Street and St James’s and Pall Mall was generally not much more than a century old in 1800 and some of it no more than half that.

North of Oxford Street to the New Road (later renamed Marylebone, Euston and Pentonville roads) almost everything was less than fifty years old. From Tottenham Court Road to Edgware Road there were three new towns. West of Cleveland Street, hardly less wealthy suburbs than Mayfair had grown up on the Portland (Cavendish-Harley) and Portman estates in Marylebone; to the east, in what some called North Soho, was a more mixed and plebeian district, aspiring to greater things in Lord Southampton’s estate, where the Adam Brothers were building Fitzroy Square, just south of the New Road. So north of Oxford Street much of the town was spanking new in 1800.

The New Road, connecting the villages of Paddington and Islington and laid down in 1756–7, was commonly accepted as London’s northern boundary in 1800. Indeed, this was a boundary to which London had not yet filled out. Between the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury and the New Road were open fields, but beyond them – and so not yet joined to London – were new districts at Somers Town, Camden Town and Pentonville. Even City Road, the south-eastward continuation of the New Road, ran across open country in 1800. Hoxton, south Shoreditch and the western portions of Bethnal Green and Stepney marked London’s edge in the east, although new docks still being built at the Isle of Dogs were drawing a thin line of development along the river through Limehouse to Poplar. Commercial Road, a new highway between the docks and London, was being built by a private company entirely over pasture and market gardens in 1800. These riverside districts were as new-built as Marylebone but for an artisan and labouring class rather than the merchants and professionals moving into the new houses in the west.

South of the river the two new bridges of mid-Georgian London had encouraged development in the suburbs at Lambeth (after Westminster Bridge was opened in 1750) and at St George’s Fields, Southwark (after Blackfriars Bridge in 1769). These were mixed areas, with artisans, clerks and tradesmen jostling for house room with poorer labourers in freshly made ‘back-slums’. So a good deal of south London in the west was less than fifty years old in 1800, with some fresh building still going on, as at London’s edge in the north.

The great lines of communication within this city, despite so much of it being new, largely followed patterns laid down by the Romans seventeen centuries or so before. There was a radial system of eight ancient highways connecting London with all parts of Britain. Most important was the road north to Cambridge and south to the coast through Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, London Bridge, Borough High Street and Newington Causeway: it was London’s backbone. For internal cross-city communications there were three great highways cutting through London west to east. Most northerly ran the ancient road from Oxford to Colchester – Oxford Street, struggling through or round St Giles to Holborn, Newgate, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate and Whitechapel. To the south was a more fractured line from Hyde Park Corner along Piccadilly, then through close streets (or taking in a diversion through Haymarket and Charing Cross) to the Strand and Fleet Street, and meeting Cheapside and the Colchester Road at St Paul’s Churchyard. Each was subject to notorious bottlenecks and ‘what is technically called a “lock”, – that is, a line of carriages of every description inextricably massed and obstructing each other, as far as the eye could stretch …’⁶ These were worst at the city’s pinch-points, especially where the southern highway met the north at the junction of St Paul’s Churchyard and Cheapside, at Temple Bar where Fleet Street met the Strand, and at the west or Charing Cross end of the Strand. Anywhere the chaos of traffic made life for pedestrians bewildering and dangerous: as in the Strand in 1803, when a broken-down hackney coach brought the traffic to a lock and two men and a woman, trying to cross the road, were trapped between two coal wagons and were crushed to death, ‘notwithstanding their screams and shrieks’.⁷ And in 1800 nearly all of London’s enormous traffic was carried on roads of gravel poured on clay, which cloyed and hampered hoof and wheel and foot alike in wet weather.

The third highway was London’s river. Some 3,000 boats and wherries plied for hire on the Thames in the early nineteenth century. Many were employed in cross-river traffic, the Thames a barrier to communications within London but still its greatest source of trade. For 1,700 years there had been just one permanent river crossing. In 1800 London Bridge was still Peter de Colechurch’s near-immortal structure, finished in 1209. The massive piers of his bridge – eighteen after one was removed in 1758–60 – so held back the tidal flow that the difference in water level between one side of the bridge and the other was some five feet. Shooting the rapids at London Bridge was a thrill for even time-served watermen, and certainly their passengers. Every year people died doing it: four sailors drowned out of six when a cutter went down in August 1811, for instance. George Borrow, fresh from Norfolk, watched a small boat shoot the bridge, ‘the boatman – a true boatman of Cockaigne that – elevating one of his skulls in triumph, the man hallooing, and the woman, a true Englishwoman that – of a certain type – waving her shawl’.⁸ The restricted flow at London Bridge was the main reason for the river freezing, as it did spectacularly in early 1814, and one factor among others in the severe flooding of the Thames (1774, 1791, 1821, 1827) and the Fleet (1809), inundating mainly Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster.

The volume of bridge traffic was enormous even in the early years of the nineteenth century. On one day in July 1811 90,000 pedestrians, 5,500 vehicles and 764 horse-riders crossed London Bridge, which was just twenty-one feet wide. Blackfriars carried about two-thirds as much. George Borrow recalled his astonishment at first seeing that

Thousands of human beings were pouring over [London] bridge. But what chiefly struck my attention was a double row of carts and wagons, the generality drawn by horses as large as elephants, each row striving in a different direction, and not infrequently brought to a standstill. Oh the cracking of whips, the shouts and oaths of the carters, and the grating of wheels upon the enormous stones that formed the pavement!⁹

There were thought to be over 30,000 vehicles in London in the pre-omnibus era around 1813, including 1,100 hackney coaches for hire and even 400 sedan chairs. Traffic staggered visitors to the city. In the West End the noise, for French-American traveller Louis Simond, was ‘a universal hubbub; a sort of uniform grinding and shaking, like that experienced in a great mill with fifty pairs of stones …’¹⁰

The great avenues of communication east and west and north and south connected but did not unite the metropolis. There were, contemporaries explained, three Londons, divided by class and economic function. The west end of town was home to court, Parliament and government. Here a wealthy leisured class enjoyed the relatively clean streets of Mayfair and Marylebone, living mainly on rents and investments which were cultivated and nurtured in the City. This was the second great London, based on money and commerce, with its own now ageing suburb in Bloomsbury. To the east of the City, in the ‘east end of the town’, was the manufacturing district and port, a workers’ city, self-sufficient and isolated from the metropolis at the centre and in the west.¹¹

These age-old divisions were, even by 1800, too unsophisticated to encapsulate London’s diverse social topography. For plebeian London, as represented by manufacturing, penetrated every district, even the smart West End, where tailors and goldsmiths and carriage-builders brushed coat-skirts with gentlemen of private means. It was even denser in Soho and it overwhelmed the cluttered ring of old London round the edge of the City and Southwark. In fact, manufacturing in 1800 was strongest of all in the City itself, not yet – and not for a long time – turned over exclusively to the circulation of commodities and capital. The manipulation of money may have been the City function of most interest to the West End, but manufacturing was by far the greatest employer of City labour. The City remained a residential and industrial district beyond the first half of the nineteenth century, with artisans, clerks, warehousemen and shopmen living nearby or ‘over the shop’. So workers skilled and unskilled – even casual labourers and beggars – could be found living almost anywhere in London. The popular polarity of ‘St Giles and St James’, used to describe the vast spectrum of poor and rich in London, disguised the fact that these irreconcilables were even closer to home. Westminster, even Mayfair, had its spots of poverty and squalor, sometimes infamously so.

With these complications in mind, the three Londons identified by contemporaries can be augmented by a fourth: old London’s City fringe and Borough belt of poverty and wage labour that on the one hand threatened London with disorder and disease and on the other provided and sustained its very means of existence. And already in 1800, crosscutting these four swathes of the metropolis, were some specialist neighbourhoods of long standing: law and letters near Temple Bar at the western edge of the City, bookselling and publishing at Paternoster Row by St Paul’s, silk weaving in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, leather curing in Bermondsey and half a dozen more that would be greatly multiplied as the new century matured.

Despite its complexity, and compared with what was to come, London was a small city in 1800. It was some five miles from Hyde Park Corner to Wapping and just over two from Sadler’s Wells, Clerkenwell, to the obelisk in St George’s Fields, Southwark. So this was a walkable city even though its sixty squares, 8,000 streets and uncountable courts and alleys were just too dense and occult for any one person to know intimately. ‘London is a giant,’ commented Louis Simond in 1817, ‘strangers can only reach his feet.’ For even at that time London was Europe’s greatest city in extent and population. Its built-up area contained about 783,000 people, and there were a further 176,000 in the nearby villages and towns that would later merge in the County of London. The population of what would become Greater London brought the whole to just over 1.1 million in 1801.¹²

London’s built-up area contained one in twelve of the people of England and Wales, a much smaller proportion than would be the case a century later. But even in 1800 there is no doubting the extraordinary power that London wielded over the minds and fortunes of the people of the British Isles. The young Thomas de Quincey was nearly fifteen when he journeyed from the West Country in the May of that year and ‘first entered this mighty wilderness, the city – no! not the city, but the nation – of London’.

Often since then, at distances of two or three hundred miles or more from this colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts, and intellectual power, have I felt the sublime expression of her enormous magnitude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence – viz., in the vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads, all with their heads directed to London, and expounding the size of the attracting body, together with the force of its attractive power, by the never-ending succession of these droves, and the remoteness from the capital of all the lines upon which they are moving.¹³

Yet paying homage to this mighty metropolis by visiting it or moving there could be a difficult venture in 1800 and for forty years to come. A sea passage was the most convenient way to get to London from Cornwall, say, or from the far north. William Jerdan, a notable London journalist of the 1840s, was a Scot from Kelso. His first journey to London in 1801 involved coaching from Edinburgh to Berwick and then sailing in a smack to Wapping: it took him nine days. Paddle steamers would cut the journey time by the 1830s but even in 1842, when Alexander Bain left Aberdeen for London, he coached to Edinburgh and then was three days at sea; returning direct to Aberdeen by fast clipper took him five days, though it was a more comfortable passage for ‘bad sailors’.¹⁴

Coaching from other parts of England was slow, uncomfortable and hazardous, especially when the coach neared London. Mrs Lynn Linton recalled that around 1830 a south-going coach ran twice a week through Eden, Cumberland, and the journey took three days and two nights. Dover was an eleven-hour trip around 1815 and express to Exeter took twenty-five hours. Even so, the volume of traffic was extensive. There were over 400 coaches from London, most leaving daily to all parts of the nation. As they returned, approaching London the numbers of passengers swamped the coaches available. ‘It is not unusual,’ it was reported in 1806, ‘to see ten on the roof, three on the box (besides the driver), four behind, on what is called the “Gamon Board”, and six on the dickey or chair; in all, often above thrice the number intended to be allowed.’ When the Croydon coach overturned that year with sixteen outside passengers, two were killed and several injured.¹⁵

When visitors reached the metropolis they were generally amazed by what they saw. Its size stunned them and so did the grandeur and immensity of its great buildings. A first view of St Paul’s ‘overwhelmed us with awe; and I did not at that time imagine that the sense of magnitude could be more deeply impressed’. The city’s street lighting by oil lamps ‘had a most striking effect, particularly at a distance, and to strangers’. Even the primitive road surfaces and paving and litter-picking were considered exemplary compared with elsewhere, at least in the smarter parts of the town. And London’s discomforts could impress as greatly as its ‘Tumult and blaze’, most notably its smoke and fog: the approach of London could be smelled and tasted on the wind for miles away, and the whiff of smoke ‘could always distinguish a London letter … on putting it to the nose’.¹⁶

More impressive perhaps than all of these were Londoners themselves. Their sharpness, showiness, fashion-consciousness, arrogance and liveliness were admired or despised but could not be ignored. So Bob Tallyho, the country cousin of Tom Dashall in Real Life in London (1821) is made to say, ‘If an acquaintance with London is to give a man these airs of superiority – this ascendancy – elegance of manners, and command of enjoyments – why, London for me …’ William Jerdan thought ‘a lad of sixteen or eighteen, educated in the country, knew less of other life, than a smart English child brought up in the capital … of only eight or ten years old’. And ‘The superiority of metropolitan society cannot be disputed, and its more enlarged and liberal modes of thinking and acting,’ wrote Cyrus Redding, a Cornishman who came to London aged twenty in 1805.¹⁷

London’s place in the nation enlarged as the nation itself grew in population and extended its influence around the world. London would become – like Rome, its only true forebear in history, with which it was much compared at the time – the Imperial City. But before it could don the purple, the metropolis had to be made fit for the task.

Cyrus Redding, who wrote his compliment to metropolitan society in 1858, concluded, ‘but neither then nor now, had I or have I, any affection for blackened brick walls, interminable streets, rattling vehicles, howling costermongers, wretchedness, poverty, and vice, made more deplorable and vicious by close contact with dissipation, wealth and luxury’. Many of Redding’s criticisms would never be successfully resolved. But all, in some way, would be addressed in the nineteenth century. And in making London fit for its status as the greatest city the world had ever seen, efforts would begin first on the ground. There were three great driving forces that would tackle the job of transforming London’s built environment. Though there was much overlap, they operated mainly in sequence. First, the crown – king and government together; second, private enterprise; last, London’s local government.

‘The ROME of Modern History’, 1800–1830

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to 1855 the crown led the attack on old London. But before 1815 the forces of change were more mixed. And first honours must go to the City Corporation for pushing forward schemes that had their origins in the early 1790s.

These were the City entrance improvements. Their originating genius had been Alderman William Pickett, a silversmith elected Lord Mayor in 1789–90, and a radical whose second claim on posterity’s attention was his demand that Pitt’s ministers remove the armed guard from the Bank of England as an ‘unnecessary introduction of the military into the civil government of the nation’. In that he failed. But his first and more successful claim was to steer through the Corporation’s creaking bureaucracy the improvement of two ancient ways into the City from Middlesex and Westminster. His success was won ‘after many and great oppositions’. And it was a victory he never lived to see, the improvements taking shape some few years after his death in 1796.¹⁸

In the north-west of the City at the border with Holborn, Snow Hill had been ‘for ages one of the most inconvenient and dangerous passages within the metropolis’. It was twisting, narrow and steep. Pickett proposed a new street to bypass Snow Hill in ‘a gentle ascent’ from Holborn Bridge to Newgate, taking down some ‘decayed and wretched’ houses in Old Bailey in the process. Demolition began about 1801 but the resumption of war in 1803 and consequent uncertainties delayed construction. In 1806 some grand houses by George Dance the Younger in the new Skinner Street – named after another improving alderman, lately defunct – were put up for disposal by lottery.¹⁹

Even more important were improvements at the ‘court end’ of the City, where the Strand joined Fleet Street at Temple Bar. The Bar itself – ‘that leaden-headed old obstruction’²⁰ designed by Wren and forming a narrow gateway across the road, marking the boundary between Westminster and the City – had been under threat of demolition for a generation. But these improvements, which also began about 1801, left Temple Bar to be a curse to carters and cabbies for seven decades and more to come. They did, though, demolish Butcher Row around 1802, a narrow street on the north side of the Strand: ‘a dirty place, composed of wretched fabrics and narrow passages … The houses overhung their foundations, the receptacles of dirt and disease, and the bane of London.’ The Strand was widened at this point and the side north of St Clement’s Church was renamed Pickett Street. There were improvements beneath the surface too. The ancient leaky sewers here ran at cellar depth to the Thames and forced filth into houses, making them ‘damp and noisome in the extreme’. So they were replaced by sound and deeper sewers which did a better job of dumping the city’s excrement into the river. There were other improvements around the same time in Jewin Street, Aldersgate; and dozens of ‘low buildings’ which ‘choaked up’ the approaches to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey were removed around 1804.²¹

²²