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The London slums were never built to last. Between 1800 and 1850, England's total population doubled, forcing people out of rural areas and into Britain's largest city, London.

The shift left the city desperate for housing. And businessmen stepped in to meet that need – while extracting a profit from London's poorest residents.

Landlords threw up shaky tenements on marshy land there for cheap. The homes were consequently shoddy and collapses claimed the lives of many residents.

The homes flooded when it rained and paper-thin walls barely kept out the cold in winter. Londoners who could not afford rent could instead purchase a night sleeping in coffins lined up in empty warehouses — for the low price of four pennies.

As one architect remarked in 1859, "It seemed scarcely possible that human beings could live. The floors were in holes, the stairs broken down, and the plastering had fallen."

Well-off Londoners derided their neighbors as sinful and lazy, drunkards and thieves. In reality, Londoners who lived in the slums worked hard to survive.

Children in the slums searched for jobs at seven years old. Boys shoveled horse dung or swept chimneys. They also shined shoes. At 13, girls might take a job at a match factory, working 14 hours a day. Others chose sex work.

The suicide rate in the Victorian slums was so high that fishing bodies out of the Thames was a full-time job.

A desperate place, the Victorian slums were nonetheless seen by the wealthy as the responsibility of the poor. As one magistrate claimed, the slums were a hub of "squalor, drunkenness, improvidence, lawlessness, immorality and crime."

The slums constantly appeared in the newspapers, too, piquing the curiosity of wealthy families who made disturbing trips there to ogle for themselves.

In the 1890s, the daughter of a wealthy family decided to visit London's slums, wondering if they were truly as terrible as the papers made them sound. When the girl later vanished in the slums, it became front-page news.

Detectives combed through the poorest corners of London until they found her being held for ransom. During her visit, the girl had apparently bragged about her wealthy parents, which led to her kidnapping by a couple of residents hoping for a reward.

The wickedness of the Victorian slums had nothing to do with the people, the slums were wicked because of the conditions the poor faced.

How Reform Changed The Shape Of The City

Charles Booth created a poverty map of London in 1889. The darker colors represent slums.

With such horrific conditions, it's not surprising that cholera and other infectious diseases plagued the slums. And because the slums were associated with disease and crime, well-off Londoners advocated for simply tearing them down.

But at first, slum clearances made the problem worse. In the 1850s and 1860s, the city cleared slums to build railroad tracks. In one decade, 56,000 renters lost their homes – while the landlords received compensation for the loss of property.

Slum removal without a plan for displaced residents did not solve the problem.

By the end of the 19th century, social campaigns helped improve conditions for London's poor. Sanitation plants eliminated the raw sewage that caused cholera outbreaks, and new schools taught impoverished children.

Charles Booth, a social reformer, brought attention to the problem with his poverty map, which highlighted London's poorest streets. Philanthropists funded building and education projects aimed at helping the impoverished. But for many, help came too late.

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Slums are often defined by: Unsafe and/or unhealthy homes (e.g. lack of windows, dirt floor, leaky walls and roofs) and overcrowded rooms.

Where were the slums in Victorian London?

During Queen Victoria’s reign numerous slums lurked behind the capital’s busy thoroughfares: Vicious and overcrowded hovels were sandwiched in between the Mile End Road and Commercial Road in Stepney, wretched rookeries lay behind Drury Lane and filthy tenements lined the west side of Borough High Street.

What was poverty like in the Victorian era?

Unsanitary and overcrowded housing, low wages, poor diet, insecure employment and the dreaded effects of sickness and old age.

The streets were narrow and the sewage water stagnated in open surface drains.

What are children like in the slums?

Children suffer from higher rates of diarrhoeal and respiratory illnesses and malnutrition. Infant mortality is at record levels.

Was Victorian life really grim?

The Victorians, especially poor ones, were at high risk of catching some nasty diseases. Most of the common killers – measles, scarlet fever, smallpox and typhus – had blighted Britain for centuries.

Why were Victorian slums built?

In the last decade of the nineteenth century London’s population expanded to four million, which spurred a high demand for cheap housing. London slums arose initially as a result of rapid population growth and industrialisation. They became notorious for overcrowding, unsanitary and squalid living conditions.

How did Victorians treat the poor?

Poor Victorians would put children to work at an early age, or even turn them out onto the streets to fend for themselves. In 1848 an estimated 30,000 homeless, filthy children lived on the streets of London. Hideously overcrowded, unsanitary slums developed, particularly in London. They were known as rookeries.

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Charles Boothe's map of London - colour coded according to income. Dark colours show the very poorest areas - the slums.

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Penniless men forced to sleep under an arched roof due to lack of room in the slums. 

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In 1849, the journalist Henry Mayhew paid a visit to one London slum. His subsequent report, In a Visit to the Cholera District of Bermondsey, shocked his readers.

Above all, his description of the filthy conditions the ‘wretched people’ of the slum had to endure on a daily basis made many angry – even if nothing was done about it. Mayhew noted that a single open sewer ran through the main street of the slum. Into this, occupants emptied buckets of waste. Indeed, he noted, “we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it”.

More shocking still, Mayhew reported that children not only bathed in the same sewer water, but that he witnessed some people taking water out of it. According to the journalist, the slum’s inhabitants would fill pails with water from the sewer. They would leave these to stand for several days. They would then be able to skim “solid particles of filth, pollution and disease” from the top of the buckets and drink the ‘clean’ water that remained. Any water that was leftover was used for bathing.

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This man doesn't have a slum to go. He is homeless and sleeping on the streets, without a shelter of any kind. 

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Slum children. Notice the lack of footwear. 

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Due to the poor living conditions infant mortality was very high in the slums - about 1 in 4 children died before they were one year old.

Many slum children had to work to help provide for their families, the jobs were often low-paying, highly dangerous, and dirty. Young boys may work as chimney sweeps or clean the streets of horse manure. Girls may turn to prostitution as young as 12.

The rates of crime and violence were very high in the slums and many young people turned to crime to avoid the workhouse. Indeed, between 1830 and 1860, half of all the defendants tried at the famous Old Bailey were aged 20 or under.

Sadly child abuse and exploitation was very common in the slums.

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A typical street

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Slum landlords could only lease land for 21 years – so their buildings were never built to last.

Most slums were made up of large houses, or tenements, divided into individual rooms. Almost all of them had been hastily erected to cash in on the population boom of the early 19th century. Enterprising – and greedy – businessmen built on marshy meadows that had previously been used as market gardens, with the clay ground long regarded as unsuitable for building on. Notably, the city regulations meant that parcels of this land could only be leased for 21 years at most. As such, builders had zero incentive to make sure the ‘homes’ they built would last longer than this.

To begin with, slum buildings had no real foundations. They were highly unstable, and would often collapse, usually with fatal consequences. This short-term thinking and rush to cut costs as much as possible also meant that the walls were just half a-brick thick. Needless to say, such thin walls offered no protection from the elements and would often simply collapse.

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This family are living in one room. Notice how filthy the children are. 

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Some middle class Victorians (on the left) walk near a much less well off person. You can see the difference in clothing here. 

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An upper class Victorian family. Sometimes the rich would visit the slum areas to gawp at the poverty in front of them! 