A House Through Time by David Olusoga

Author:David Olusoga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Those who lost their homes when Victoria Street was ploughed through the Devil’s Acre included a number of people who had only recently moved there, having been displaced from St Giles Rookery. They and the older residents were now harried across the capital. Many were forced to crowd into what remained of the Devil’s Acre or seek new rooms in nearby districts. According to the Bishop of London three-quarters of the five thousand people who were displaced by building Victoria Street migrated to desperately poor areas on the south side of the Thames, districts that now groaned under the pressure of even greater levels of overcrowding. ‘In many instances’, he wrote, ‘where one family had a house before there were now three or four families in it.’ Victoria Street, the ‘improved thoroughfare’, wrote John Hollingshead in his 1861 book Ragged London, ‘was ploughed through to Pimlico’, but the ‘diseased heart’ of the Devil’s Acre slum was merely ‘divided in half – one part was pushed on one side, and the other part on the other’. The ‘chief result’, Hollingshead concluded, ‘has been to cause more huddling together.’ The investors in the improvement scheme had succeeded in breaking up the old slum but failed to make the return on their investments that they had hoped for. As Hollingshead noted, Victoria Street became a ‘nightmare street of unlet palaces . . . waiting for more capital to fill its yawning gulf and a few more residents to warm its hollow chambers in to life’, while elsewhere ‘the landlords of the slums were raising their rents; and thieves, prostitutes, labourers, and working women were packed in a smaller compass.’

At Devil’s Acre, as with St Giles Rookery, the improvements had failed to comprehensively sweep away the slum. After the building of Victoria Street, Gustave Doré produced an image, albeit a stylized one, of a group of slum houses in the Devil’s Acre (see the plate section). It appears in London: a Pilgrimage, a collaboration with the journalist William Blanchard Jerrold. Doré depicts the surviving court as a cluster of miserable and tiny dwellings, with low ceilings and patched-up walls, built around a communal yard. The land around them is littered with piles of ash and dust across which shrouded figures wander. To one side are the better-constructed buildings that face the main road and conceal the horrors of the slum from general view. Westminster Abbey is seen behind in the distance. The accompanying text, written by Jerrold, again stresses how the world of the slum dwellers and that of the wealthy and powerful existed side by side: ‘The Solemn and Venerable is at the elbow of the sordid and the woe-begone. By the noble Abbey is the ignoble Devil’s Acre, hideous where it now lies in the sunlight!’

The drive to replace London’s narrow lanes and alleys with wide thoroughfares like Victoria Street and New Oxford Street continued unrelentingly. By the middle of the century Regent Street had displaced the old rookery at Soho, Victoria

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.