In mid-Victorian London, some of the very worst slums were concentrated around Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street. The worst were apparently round the top end of Turnmill Street and Briton Street in an area known as ‘Little Hell’. It was also known as ‘Jack Ketch’s Warren’. Nobody knows who Jack Ketch was or why he earned the honour of lending his name to the place. There had been a famous executioner by that name – but he had lived three centuries earlier in the reign of Charles II. The slum certainly lived up to the ‘warren’ part of the name. It was made up of numerous little courts with buildings squeezed in all round, and reached via narrow alleys barely wide enough for a person to squeeze down. Another slum was called Liquorpond Street.
The area had always been associated with crime and with activities that would not be allowed in the very proper City nearby – activities such as bearbaiting, cockfighting, dancing, singing, drinking and gambling. Not that different from the streets outside Fabric on a Friday night nowadays.
There were a lot of well-meaning efforts to clear the slums, but what did for them in the end was the force behind most things – commercial and business needs. The powers-that-be decided to create a grand arterial route right the way from Hyde Park Corner to Bethnal Green. The section between Goswell Road and Farringdon Road contained a track called ‘Wilderness Row’ but it wasn’t a proper road. To link up with Old Street and Theobald’s Road, a new section of road – what we now know as Clerkenwell Road – had to be built from scratch. To maintain a straight road, the route of the new road had to go right through the slums. (It also cut St John’s Square in half). So that was the end of most of ‘Little Hell’.
The road clearances didn’t completely eradicate the slums, and they lingered on into the 1890s in the many little courts on the north side of Cowcross Street. As with ‘Little Hell’ they were driven out by commercial interests wanting to build factories and warehouses. Clearances for the railway to Farringdon also contributed to the clearance of slums.
I am referring to them as ‘slums’, without explaining what life was like for the people living there. From the 1850s onwards campaigners were visiting the slums of Turnmill Street and publishing articles about them to try to engage public opinion to create pressure for reform. They reported that there was very little drainage, that sanitation was appalling, and that there was little or no water supply. One writer said that there was one toilet (what they then called a ‘water closet’) in one of the courts for everyone who lived there. One of them, Rose Alley – a nice ironic name that – had one toilet between 116 people.
Water was hard to come by. Courts stored water in used beer casks and cisterns for communal use, but once the connection between contaminated water supplies and cholera was realised, these storage containers were often compulsorily cleared away. Instead, there might be only a standpipe from which water could be drawn. But the authorities only allowed it to be turned on for a short while each day. A writer recorded that in 1862, the standpipes in Frying Pan Alley, and other courts in Turnmill Street, were turned on for only 20 minutes each day – 20 minutes during which the wretched residents had to rush past as quickly as they could with pots and pans to collect whatever they could carry – and each individual was limited to one gallon.
Thomas Nisbett, a missionary, did a report on the Turnmill Street slums. I don’t think it’s the report that so interesting, rather the idea that, missionaries should be finding Clerkenwell more challenging than unexplored parts of Africa.
What the residents complained that they found most deeply unpleasant themselves was the presence of fried fish sellers. These street sellers would fry fish in an ordinary frying pan and then go round the streets and into the public houses trying to sell pieces. This cooking – apparently with rancid oil and fish which was already stinking – created a rank smell that repelled even long-suffering slum dwellers.
Frying Pan Alley got its name, not from the fish frying, but from its long narrow entry – like the handle of a pan. It was 20 feet long and only two and a half feet wide. A social reformer of the time noted that you couldn’t even get a coffin down it without turning it on its edge. He also recorded that there were 25 people sleeping in one tenement of two rooms. The windows were stuffed with rags and rubbish to keep the cold out. The only furniture was a stool and a broken bedstead. Other possessions included bottles of holy water hung from the ceiling, and pieces of iron, bone and cinders collected from the street outside.
Slums were not replaced with new housing, but with commercial warehouses and factories. The people who were evicted had to find homes in other slums.
It’s impossible to tell from contemporary records whether the slums were a new development of Victorian life or whether they had always been there. In all likelihood, it was the huge influx of people into London during the Victorian age which led to such overcrowding and terrible conditions. The slums may have arrived in the early Victorian period, flourished (if you can call it that) for a few decades, and then disappeared again before the end of the century.