Slums And Slum Clearance In Victorian London

First published in 1986. Victorian London is a classic site of the slum. This study looks at the process of slum clearance. It covers the development of policies and programmes from their initiation through Cross's Act (1875) to the abandonment of clearance by the London County Council at the end of the Victorian period in favour of a suburban solution. It is concerned with the manner in which such policies related to the nature of the slum and its place in the urban structure. The discussion ranges from contemporary understanding of such matters to the detailed content and repercussions of policies, which required the designation of unfit houses, the compensation of property owners, the displacement of tenants, and the rebuilding of sites.

The problem of how, where, and on what terms to house the urban masses in an industrial society remains unresolved to this day. In nineteenth-century Victorian England, overcrowding was the most obvious characteristic of urban housing and, despite constant agitation, it remained widespread and persistent in London and other great cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool well into the twentieth century. The Eternal Slum is the first full-length examination of working-class housing issues in a British town. The city investigated not only provided the context for the development of a national policy but also, in scale and variety of response, stood in the vanguard of housing reform. The failure of traditional methods of social amelioration in mid-century, the mounting storm of public protest, the efforts of individual philanthropists, and then the gradual formulation and application of new remedies, constituted a major theme: the need for municipal enterprise and state intervention. Meanwhile, the concept of overcrowding, never precisely defined in law but based on middle-class notions of decency and privacy, slowly gave way to the positive idea of adequate living space, with comfort, as much as health or morals, the criterion.Not just dwellings but people were at issue. There is little evidence in this period of the attitude of the worker himself to his housing. Wohl has extensively researched local archives and, in particular, drawn on the vestry reports which have been relatively neglected. Profusely illustrated with contemporary photographs and drawings, this book is the definitive study of the housing reform movement in Victorian and Edwardian London and suggests what it was really like to live under such appalling conditions. This important study will be of interest to social historians, British historians, urban planners, and those interested in how social policies developed in previous eras.

From the early Victorian period to the 1970s, the question of slums occupied an important place in British politics and in housing and town planning policies. The inter-war period has two major points of interest. It sees the restoration of slum clearance following a period of opposition and the onset of the first national slum clearance campaign. It reaches its climax in the plans for large-scale redevelopment made during World War II.

An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical Age into an important medieval city and significant Renaissance urban center to a modern colossus--full of a free people ever evolving. Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with vigor and wit. 58 photos.

The Seven Dials refers to the layout of the cobbled streets in this London 'village,' which includes Monmouth Street, Earlham Street and Mercer Street. The seven streets radiate out from the central sundial Looking closely you'll see the dial only has only six faces; this is due to an earlier urban planning drawn up by Thomas Neale in the 17th century who devised the characteristic seven dials street layout to maximize the number of houses that could be built on the site so maximizing his profit.

'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The Times A powerful exploration of the seedy side of Victorian London by one of our most promising young historians. In 1887 government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen. The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air. Award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire. A revelatory and prescient read about cities, class and inequality, the message at the heart of The Blackest Streets still resonates today.