Is chiefly to be found in Whitechapel, in Westminster, and in Drury Lane.
It is in such places the majority of our working men live, especially
when they are out of work or given to drink; and the drinking that goes
on in these places is often truly frightful, especially where the sexes
are mixed, and married people, or men and women supposed to be such,
abound. In some of these lodging-houses as many as two or three hundred
people live; and if anything can keep a man down in the world, and render
him hopeless as to the future, it is the society and the general tone of
such places. Yet in them are to be met women who were expected to shine
in society—students from the universities—ministers of the Gospel—all
herding in these filthy dens like so many swine. It is rarely a man
rises from the low surroundings of a low lodging-house. He must be a
very strong man if he does. Such a place as a Workman’s City has no
charms for the class of whom I write. Some of them would not care to
live there. It is no attraction to them that there is no public-house on
the estate, that the houses are clean, that the people are orderly, that
the air is pure and bracing. They have no taste or capacity for the
enjoyment of that kind of life. They have lived in slums, they have been
accustomed to filth, they have no objection to overcrowding, they must
have a public-house next door. This is why they live in St. Giles’s or
in Whitechapel, where the sight of their numbers is appalling, or why
they crowd into such low neighbourhoods as abound in Drury Lane. Drury
Lane is not at all times handy for their work. On the contrary, some of
its inhabitants come a long way. One Saturday night I met a man there
who told me he worked at Aldershot. Of course to many it is convenient.
It is near Covent Garden, where many go to work as early as 4 A.M.; and
it is close to the Strand, where its juvenile population earn their daily
food. Ten to one the boy who offers you “the Hevening Hecho,” the lass
who would fain sell you cigar-lights and flowers, the woman who thrusts
the opera programme into your carriage as you drive down Bow Street, the
questionable gentleman who, if chance occurs, eases you of your
pocket-handkerchief or your purse, the poor girl who, in tawdry finery,
walks her weary way backwards and forwards in the Strand, whether the
weather be wet or dry, long after her virtuous sisters are asleep—all
hail from Drury Lane. It has ever been a spot to be shunned. Upwards of
a hundred years ago, Gay wrote in his “Trivia”—
Oh, may thy virtue guard thee through the roads
Of Drury’s mazy courts and dark abodes.
It is not of Drury Lane itself, but of its mazy courts that I write.
Drury Lane is a shabby but industrious street. It is inhabited chiefly
by tradespeople, who, like all of us, have to work hard for their living;
but at the back of Drury Lane—on the left as you come from New Oxford
Street—there run courts and streets as densely inhabited as any of the
most crowded and filthy parts of the metropolis, and compared with which
Drury Lane is respectability itself. A few days since I wanted to hear
Happy William in a fine new chapel they have got in Little Wild Street.
As I went my way, past rag-shops and cow-houses, I found myself in an
exclusively Irish population, some of whom were kneeling and crossing
themselves at the old Roman Catholic chapel close by, but the larger
number of whom were drinking at one or other of the public-houses of the
district. At the newspaper-shop at the corner, the only bills I saw were
those of _The Flag of Ireland_, or _The Irishman_, or _The Universe_. In
about half an hour there were three fights, one of them between women,
which was watched with breathless interest by a swarming crowd, and which
ended in one of the combatants, a yellow-haired female, being led to the
neighbouring hospital. On his native heather an Irishman cares little
about cleanliness. As I have seen his rude hut, in which the pigs and
potatoes and the children are mixed up in inextricable confusion, I have
felt how pressing is the question in Ireland, not of Home Rule, but of
Home Reform. I admit his children are fat and numerous, but it is
because they live on the hill-side, where no pestilent breath from the
city ever comes.
In the neighbourhood of Drury Lane it is different; there is no fresh air
there, and the only flowers one sees are those bought at Covent Garden.
Everywhere on a summer night (she “has no smile of light” in Drury Lane),
you are surrounded by men, women, and children, so that you can scarce
pick your way. In Parker Street and Charles Street, and such-like
places, the houses seem as if they never had been cleaned since they were
built, yet each house is full of people—the number of families is
according to the number of rooms. I should say four-and-sixpence a week
is the average rent for these tumble-down and truly repulsive apartments.
Children play in the middle of the street, amidst the dirt and refuse;
costermongers, who are the capitalists of the district, live here with
their donkeys; across the courts is hung the family linen to dry. You
sicken at every step. Men stand leaning gloomily against the sides of
the houses; women, with unlovely faces, glare at you sullenly as you pass
by.
The City Missionary is, perhaps, the only one who comes here with a
friendly word, and a drop of comfort and hope for all. Of course the
inhabitants are as little indoors as possible. It may be that the
streets are dull and dirty, but the interiors are worse. Only think of a
family, with grown-up sons and daughters, all living and sleeping in one
room! The conditions of the place are as bad morally as they are
physically.
It is but natural that the people drink more than they eat, that the
women soon grow old and haggard, and that the little babes, stupefied
with gin and beer, die off, happily, almost as fast as they are born.
Here you see men and women so foul and scarred and degraded that it is
mockery to say that they were made in the image of the Maker, and that
the inspiration of the Almighty gave them understanding; and you ask is
this a civilised land, and are we a Christian people?
No wonder that from such haunts the girl gladly rushes to put on the
harlot’s livery of shame, and comes here after her short career of gaiety
to die of disease and gin. In some of the streets are forty or fifty
lodging-houses for women or men, as the case may be. In some of these
lodging-houses there are men who make their thirty shillings or two
pounds a week. In others are the broken-down mendicants who live on
soup-kitchens and begging. You can see no greater wretchedness in the
human form than what you see here. And, as some of these lodging-houses
will hold ninety people, you may get some idea of their number. When I
say that the sitting-room is common to all, that it has always a roaring
fire, and that all day, and almost all night long, each lodger is cooking
his victuals, you can get a fair idea of the intolerable atmosphere, in
spite of the door being ever open. It seemed to me that a large number
of the people could live in better apartments if they were so disposed,
and if their only enjoyment was not a public-house debauch. The keepers
of these houses seemed very fair-spoken men.
I met with only one rebuff, and that was at a model house in Charles
Street. As I airily tapped at the window, and asked the old woman if I
could have a bed, at first she was civil enough, but when I ventured to
question her a bit she angrily took herself off, remarking that she did
not know who I was, and that she was not going to let a stranger get
information out of her.
As to myself, I can only say that I had rather lodge in any gaol than in
the slums of Drury Lane. The sight of sights in this district is that of
the public-houses and the crowds who fill them. On Saturday every bar
was crammed; at some you could not get in at the door. The women were as
numerous as the men; in the daytime they are far more so; and as almost
every woman has a child in her arms, and another or two tugging at her
gown, and as they are all formed into gossiping knots, one can imagine
the noise of such places.
D.D.—City readers will know whom I refer to—has opened a branch
establishment in Drury Lane, and his place was the only one that was not
crowded. I can easily understand the reason—one of the regulations of
D.D.’s establishment is that no intoxicated person should be served. I
have reason to conclude, from a conversation I had some time ago with one
of D.D.’s barmen, that the rule is not very strictly enforced; but if it
were carried out at all by the other publicans in Drury Lane I am sure
there would be a great falling off of business. Almost every woman had a
basket; in that basket was a bottle, which, in the course of the evening,
was filled with gin for private consumption; and it was quite appalling
to see the number of little pale-faced ragged girls who came with similar
bottles on a similar errand. When the liquor takes effect, the women are
the most troublesome, and use the worst language.
On my remarking to a policeman that the neighbourhood was, comparatively
speaking, quiet, he said there had been three or four rows already, and
pointed to a pool of blood as confirmation of his statement. The men
seemed all more or less stupidly drunk, and stood up one against another
like a certain Scotch regiment, of which the officer, when complimented
on their sobriety, remarked that they resembled a pack of cards—if one
falls, down go all the rest.
Late hours are the fashion in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane. It is
never before two on a Sunday morning that there is quiet there. Death,
says Horace, strikes with equal foot the home of the poor and the palace
of the prince. This is not true as regards low lodging-houses. Even in
Bethnal Green the Sanitary Commission found that the mean age at death
among the families of the gentry, professionalists, and richer classes of
that part of Loudon was forty-four, whilst that of the families of the
artisan class was about twenty-two.
Everyone—for surely everyone has read Mr. Plimsoll’s appeal on behalf of
the poor sailors—must remember the description of his experiences in a
lodging-house of the better sort, established by the efforts of Lord
Shaftesbury in Fetter Lane and Hatton Garden. “It is astonishing,” says
Mr. Plimsoll, “how little you can live on when you divest yourselves of
all fancied needs. I had plenty of good wheat bread to eat all the week,
and the half of a herring for a relish (less will do, if you can’t afford
half, for it is a splendid fish), and good coffee to drink, and I know
how much—or, rather how little—roast shoulder of mutton you can get for
twopence for your Sunday’s dinner.”
I propose to write of other lodging-houses—houses of a lower character,
and filled, I imagine, with men of a lower class. Mr. Plimsoll speaks in
tones of admiration of the honest hard-working men whom he met in his
lodging-house. They were certainly gifted with manly virtues, and
deserved all his praise. In answer to the question, What did I see
there? he replies:
“I found the workmen considerate for each other. I found that they would
go out (those who were out of employment) day after day, and patiently
trudge miles and miles seeking employment, returning night after night
unsuccessful and dispirited, only, however, to sally out the following
morning with renewed determination. They would walk incredibly long
distances to places where they heard of a job of work; and this, not for
a few days, but for many, many days. And I have seen such a man sit down
wearily by the fire (we had a common room for sitting, and cooking, and
everything), with a hungry, despondent look—he had not tasted food all
day—and accosted by another, scarcely less poor than himself, with ‘Here,
mate, get this into thee,’ handing him at the same time a piece of bread
and some cold meat, and afterwards some coffee, and adding, ‘Better luck
to-morrow; keep up your pecker.’ And all this without any idea that they
were practising the most splendid patience, fortitude, courage, and
generosity I had ever seen.”
Perhaps the eulogy is a little overstrained. Men, even if they are not
working men, do learn to help each other, unless they are very bad
indeed; and it does not seem so surprising to me as it does to Mr.
Plimsoll that even such men “talk of absent wife and children.”
Certainly it is the least a husband and the father of a family can do.
The British working man has his fair share of faults, but just now he has
been so belaboured on all sides with praise that he is getting to be
rather a nuisance. In our day it is to be feared he is rapidly
degenerating. He does not work so well as he did, nor so long, and he
gets higher wages. One natural result of this state of things is that
the class just above him—the class who, perhaps, are the worst off in the
land—have to pay an increased price for everything that they eat and
drink or wear, or need in any way for the use of their persons or the
comfort and protection of their homes. Another result, and this is much
worse, is that the workman spends his extra time and wages in the
public-houses, and that we have an increase of paupers to keep and crime
to punish. There is no gainsaying admitted facts; there is no use in
boasting of the increased intelligence of the working man, when the facts
are the other way. As he gets more money and power, he becomes less
amenable to rule and reason. Last year, according to Colonel Henderson’s
report, drunk and disorderly cases had increased from 23,007 to 33,867.
It is to be expected the returns of the City police will be equally
unsatisfactory. As I write, I take the following from _The Echo_: In a
certain district in London, facing each other, are two corner-houses in
which the business of a publican and a chemist are respectively carried
on. In the course of twenty-five years the houses have changed hands
three times, and at the last change the purchase money of the
public-house amounted to £14,300, and that of the chemist’s business to
only £1,000. Of course the publican drives his carriage and pair, while
the druggist has to use Shanks’s pony.
But this is a digression. It is of lodging-houses I write. It seems
that there are lodging-houses of many kinds. Perhaps some of the best
were those of which Mr. Plimsoll had experience. The Peabody buildings
are, I believe, not inhabited by poor people at all. The worst, perhaps,
are those in Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields, and the adjacent
district. One naturally assumes that no good can come out of Flower and
Dean Street, just as it was assumed of old that no good could come out of
Nazareth. This was illustrated in a curious way the other day. One of
the earnest philanthropists connected with Miss Macpherson’s Home of
Industry at the corner, was talking with an old woman on the way of
salvation. She pleaded that on that head she had nothing to learn. She
had led a good life, she had never done anybody any harm, she never used
bad language, and, in short, she had lived in the village of Morality, to
quote John Bunyan, of which Mr. Worldly Wiseman had so much to say when
he met poor Christian, just as he had escaped with his heavy burden on
his shoulder out of the Slough of Despond, and that would not do for our
young evangelist.
“My good woman,” said he sadly, “that is not enough. You may have been
all you say, and yet not be a true Christian after all.”
“Of course it ain’t,” said a man who had been listening to the
conversation. “You’ll never get to heaven that way. You must believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and then you will be saved.”
“Ah,” said the evangelist, “you know that, do you? I hope you live
accordingly.”
“Oh yes; I know it well enough,” was the reply; “but of course I can’t
practise it. I am one of the light-fingered gentry, I am, and I live in
Flower and Dean Street;” and away he hurried as if he saw a policeman,
and as if he knew that he was wanted.
The above anecdote, the truth of which I can vouch for, indicates the
sort of place Flower and Dean Street is, and the kind of company one
meets there. It is a place that always gives the police a great deal of
trouble. Close by is a court, even lower in the world than Flower and
Dean Street, and it is to me a wonder how such a place can be suffered to
exist. What with Keane’s Court and Flower and Dean Street the police
have their hands pretty full day and night, especially the latter.
Robbery and drunkenness and fighting and midnight brawls are the regular
and normal state of affairs, and are expected as a matter of course.
When I was there last a woman had been taken out of Keane’s Court on a
charge of stabbing a man she had inveigled into one of the houses, or
rather hovels—you can scarcely call them houses in the court. She was
let off, as the man refused to appear against her, and the chances are
that she will again be at her little tricks. They have rough ways, the
men and women of this district; they are not given to stand much upon
ceremony; they have little faith in moral suasion, but have unbounded
confidence in physical force. A few miles of such a place, and London
were a Sodom and Gomorrah.
But I have not yet described the street. We will walk down it, if you
please. It is not a long street, nor is it a very new one; but is it a
very striking one, nevertheless. Every house almost you come to is a
lodging-house, and some of them are very large ones, holding as many as
four hundred beds. Men unshaven and unwashed are standing loafing about,
though in reality this is the hour when, all over London, honest men are
too glad to be at work earning their daily bread. A few lads and men are
engaged in the intellectual and fashionable amusement known as pitch and
toss. Well, if they play fairly, I do not know that City people can find
much fault with them for doing so. They cannot get rid of their money
more quickly than they would were they to gamble on the Stock Exchange,
or to invest in limited liability companies or mines which promise cent.
per cent. and never yield a rap but to the promoters who get up the
bubble, or to the agent who, as a friend, begs and persuades you to go
into them, as he has a lot of shares which he means to keep for himself,
but of which, as you are a friend, and as a mark of special favour, he
would kindly accommodate you with a few.
But your presence is not welcomed in the street. You are not a lodger,
that is clear. Curious and angry eyes follow you all the way. Of course
your presence there—the apparition of anything respectable—is an event
which creates alarm rather than surprise.
In the square mile of which this street in the centre, it is computed are
crowded one hundred and twenty thousand of our poorest population—men and
women who have sunk exhausted in the battle of life, and who come here to
hide their wretchedness and shame, and in too many cases to train their
little ones to follow in their steps. The children have neither shoes
nor stockings. They are covered with filth, they are innocent of all the
social virtues, and here is their happy hunting-ground; they are a people
by themselves.
All round are planted Jews and Germans. In Commercial Street the chances
are you may hear as much German as if you were in Deutschland itself.
Nor is this all; the place is a perfect Babel. It is a pity that Flower
and Dean Street should be, as it were, representative of England and her
institutions. It must give the intelligent foreigner rather a shock.
But _place aux dames_ is my motto, and even in the slums let woman take
the position which is her due. In the streets the ladies are not in any
sense particular, and can scream long and loudly, particularly when under
the influence of liquor. They are especially well developed as to their
arms, and can defend themselves, if that be necessary, against the
rudeness or insolence or the too-gushing affection of the other sex. As
to their manners and morals, perhaps the less said about them the better.
Let us step into one of the lodging-houses which is set apart exclusively
for their use. The charge for admission is threepence or fourpence a
night, or a little less by the week. You can have no idea of the size of
one of these places unless you enter. We will pay a visit in the
afternoon, when most of the bedrooms are empty. At the door is a
box-office, as it were, for the sale of tickets of admission. Behind
extends a large room, provided at one end with cooking apparatus and well
supplied with tables and chairs, at which are seated a few old helpless
females, who have nothing to do, and don’t seem to care much about
getting out into the sun. Let us ascend under the guidance of the female
who has charge of the place, and who has to sit up till 3 A.M. to admit
her fair friends, some of whom evidently keep bad hours and are given
rather too much to the habit of what we call making a night of it. Of
course most of the rooms are unoccupied, but they are full of beds, which
are placed as close together as possible; and this is all the furniture
in the room, with the exception of the glass, without which no one, male
or female, can properly perform the duties of the toilette. One woman is
already thus occupied. In another room, we catch sight of a few still in
bed, or sitting listlessly on their beds. They are mostly youthful, and
regard us from afar with natural curiosity—some actually seeming inclined
to giggle at our intrusion. As it is, we feel thankful that we need not
remain a moment in such company, and we leave them to their terrible
fate.
A few hours later they will be out in the streets, seeking whom they may
devour. Go down Whitechapel way, and you will see them in shoals
haunting the public-houses of the district, or promenading the pavement,
or talking to men as sunk in the social scale as themselves. They are
fond of light dresses; they eschew bonnets or hats. Some are
half-starved; others seem in good condition; and they need be so to stand
the life they have to lead. Let us hope Heaven will have more mercy on
such as they than man. It cannot be that decent respectable women live
in Flower and Dean Street.
But what of the men? Well, I answer at the first glance, you see that
they are a rough lot. Some are simply unfortunate and friendless and
poor; others do really work honestly for their living—as dock labourers,
or as porters in some of the surrounding markets, or at any chance job
that may come in their way; many, alas, are of the light-fingered
fraternity. The police have but a poor opinion of the honesty of the
entire district—but then the police are so uncharitable! The members of
the Christian community and others who come here on a Sunday and preach
in more than one of the lodging-houses in the street have a better
opinion, and certainly can point to men and women reclaimed by their
labours, and now leading decent godly lives. It requires some firmness
and Christian love to go preaching in these huge lodging-houses, in which
one, it seemed to me, might easily be made away with. Even in the
daytime they have an ugly look, filled as they are with idle men, who are
asleep now, but who will be busy enough by-and-by—when honesty has done
its work and respectability is gone to bed. As commercial speculations I
suppose money is made by these places. The proprietor has but little
expense to incur in the way of providing furniture or attendance, and in
some cases he supplies refreshments, on which of course he makes a
profit. But each lodger is at liberty to cater for himself, or to leave
it alone if times are bad and money is scarce. At any rate there is the
fire always burning, and the locker in which each lodger may stow away
what epicurean delicacy or worldly treasure he may possess. I have been
in prisons and workhouses, and I can say the inmates of such places are
much better lodged, and have better care taken of them, and are better
off than the poor people of Flower and Dean Street. The best thing that
could happen for them would be the destruction of the whole place by
fire. Circumstances have much to do with the formation of character, and
in a more respectable neighbourhood they would become a little more
respectable themselves.
In the lodging-houses at Westminster the inhabitants are of a much more
industrious character. In Lant Street, Borough, they are quite the
reverse. A man should have his wits about him who attempts to penetrate
into the mysteries or to understand the life of a low lodging-house
there.
For ages the Mint in the Borough has gained an unenviable name, not only
as the happy hunting-ground of the disreputable, the prostitute, the
thief, the outcast, the most wretched and the lowest of the poor, yet
there was a time when it was great and famous. There that brave and
accomplished courtier, the Duke of Suffolk, brought his royal bride, the
handsome sister of our Henry VIII. It was there poor Edward VI. came on
a visit all the way from Hampton Court. It was the goodly gift of Mary
the unhappy and ill-fated to the Archbishop of York. Somehow or other
Church property seems to be detrimental to the respectability of a
neighbourhood, hence the truth of the old adage, “The nearer the church,
the farther from God.” At any rate this was the case as regards the Mint
in the Borough, which in Gay’s time had sunk so low that he made it the
scene of his “Beggar’s Opera,” and there still law may be said to be
powerless, and there still they point out the house in which lived
Jonathan Wild. In the reign of William, our Protestant hero, and George
I., our Hanoverian deliverer, a desperate attempt was made to clear the
place of the rogues and vagabonds to whom it afforded shelter and
sanctuary; but somehow or other in vain, though all debtors under fifty
pounds had their liabilities wiped off by royal liberality. The place
was past mending, and so it has ever since remained. It is not a
neighbourhood for a lady at any time, but to inhabit it all that is
requisite is that, by fair means or foul (in the Mint they are as little
particular as to the way in which money is made as they are in the City
or on the Stock Exchange), you have fourpence to pay for a night’s
lodging. All round the place prices may be described as low, to suit the
convenience of the customer. You are shaved for a penny. Your hair is
cut and curled for twopence. The literature for sale may be termed
sensational, and the chandlers’ shops, which are of the truest character
if I may judge by the contents, do a trade which may be described as
miscellaneous.
It is sad to see the successive waves of pauperism rise and burst and
disappear. On they come, one after another, as fast as the eye can catch
them, and far faster than the mind can realise all the hidden and complex
causes of which they are the painful result. One asks, Is this always to
be so? Is there to be no end to this supply, of which we see only the
surface, as it were? Are all the lessons of the past in vain? Cannot
Science, with all its boasted arts, remove the causes, be they what they
may, and effect a cure? Is the task too appalling for philanthropy?
Some such thoughts came into my head as I looked upon the dense mass of
men and women, destitute of work and food, who, at an early hour on the
first Sunday in the New Year were collected from all the lodging-houses
in the unpretentious but well-known building known as the Gray’s Yard
Ragged Church and Schools, in a part of London not supposed, like the
Seven Dials, to be the home of the wretched, and close by the mansions of
the rich and the great. When I entered, as many as seven hundred had
been got together, and there was a crowd three hundred strong, equally
hungry, equally destitute, and equally worthy of Christian benevolence.
On entering, each person, as soon as he or she had taken his or her seat,
was treated to two thick slices of bread-and-butter and a cup of coffee,
and at the close of the service there was the usual distribution of a
pound meat-pie and a piece of cake to each individual, and coffee _ad
libitum_. It may be added that the cost of this breakfast does not come
out of the funds of the institution, but is defrayed by special
subscriptions, and that Mr. John Morley had sent, as he always does, a
parcel of one thousand Gospels for distribution. But what has this got
to do, asks the reader, with the thought which, as I say, the sight
suggested to me? Why, everything. In the course of the morning, Mr. F.
Bevan, the chairman, asked those who had been there before to hold up
their hands, and there was not one hand held up in answer to the
question. There was a similar negative response when it was asked of
that able-bodied mass before me—for there were no very old men in the
crowd—as to whether any of them were in regular work. This year’s
pauperism is, then, but the crop of the year. Relieved to-day, next year
another crowd will follow; and so the dark and sullen waves, mournfully
moaning and wailing, of the measureless ocean of human sorrow and
suffering, and want and despair, ever come and ever go. The Christian
Church is the lifeboat sailing across this ocean in answer to the cry for
help, and rescuing them that are ready to perish. There are cynics who
say even all this Christmas feasting does no good. It is a fact that on
Christmas week there is a sudden and wonderful exodus from the workhouses
around London.
We cannot get improved men and women till we have improved
lodging-houses. Recently it was calculated that in St. Giles’s parish
(once it was St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields), there were no less than 3,000
families living in single rooms. Again, in the parish of Holborn, there
were quite 12,000, out of a population of 44,000, living in single rooms.
Under such circumstances, what can we expect but physical and moral
degradation? Healthy life is impossible for man or woman, boy or girl.
A Divine Authority tells us, men do not gather grapes of thorns or figs
of thistles. As I write, however, a ray of light reaches me. It appears
nearly 10,000 persons are now reaping the benefit of the Peabody Fund.
In the far east there are buildings at Shadwell and Spitalfields; in the
far west at Chelsea, in Westminster, and at Grosvenor Road, Pimlico—the
latter perfectly appointed edifice alone accommodating 1,952 persons. As
many as 768 are lodged in the Islington block, and on the south side of
the Thames there are Peabody buildings at Bermondsey, in the Blackfriars
Road, Stamford Street, and Southwark Street. One room in the Peabody
buildings is never let to two persons. A writer in _The Daily News_
says: Advantage has been taken by the Peabody trustees to purchase land
brought into the market by the operation of the Artisans and Labourers’
Dwellings Act. At the present moment nineteen blocks of building are in
course of removal either by the City or the Metropolitan Board of Works.
They are situate at Peartree Court, Clerkenwell; Goulston Street,
Whitechapel; St. George the Martyr, Southwark; Bedfordbury; Whitechapel
and Limehouse, near the London Docks; High Street, Islington; Essex Road,
Islington; Whitecross Street; Old Pye Street, Westminster; Great Wild
Street, Drury Lane; Marylebone, hard by the Edgware Road; Wells Street,
Poplar; Little Coram Street; and Great Peter Street, Westminster. All
these are under the control of the Metropolitan Board of Works. The
remaining three—at Petticoat Square, at Golden Lane, and at Barbican—are
being removed by the Corporation of the City of London. It is estimated
that forty-one acres of land will be laid bare by this clearance—a space
capable of lodging properly at least as many thousand people. There are
of course other helpers in the same direction as the Peabody trustees,
without being quite in the same sense public bodies administering a large
fund for a special purpose, with the single object of extending its
sphere of usefulness in accordance with public policy. Some of the
companies, however, work for five per cent. return, and their efforts to
construct suitable dwellings for workpeople and labourers are very
valuable. The Improved Industrial Dwellings Company has buildings at
Bethnal Green Road, at Shoreditch, at Willow Street, and close to the
goods station of the Great Northern Railway, besides two blocks near the
City Road. The Metropolitan Association has blocks of buildings in
Whitechapel, and in many spots farther west, as have the Marylebone
Association, the London Labourers’ Dwellings Society, and other bodies of
similar kind. The success of Miss Octavia Hill in encouraging the
construction of dwellings of the class required is well known, as are the
buildings erected by Sir Sydney Waterlow, Mr. G. Cutt, and Mr. Newson.
It is almost needless to add that the Baroness Burdett-Coutts has taken a
warm interest in this important movement, as a building at Shoreditch now
accommodating seven hundred persons will testify.