Free The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd by Fiona Rule Page B

find. Families barely had enough money to feed themselves, let alone enough to find rent money for a reasonably furnished room. Consequently the common lodging houses that lined Dorset Street (and many other streets in Spitalfields), experienced an unprecedented boom. However, their burgeoning business was soon to come under the scrutiny of social reformers, journalists and ultimately, the Government.

Chapter 11
     

The Common Lodging House Act
    By the beginning of the 1850s, the already pitiful plight of the poor in Spitalfields had been exacerbated to an almost unbearable degree by the arrival of the Irish immigrants. The area was now among the poorest in the whole of London and was beginning to attract the attention of the press. In 1849, the journalist Henry Mayhew visited Spitalfields in search of acute poverty for an article he was writing for the Morning Chronicle newspaper. He was particularly touched by the plight of the old silk weavers, who he found living ‘in a state of gloomy destitution, sitting in their wretched rooms dreaming of the neat houses and roast beef of long ago.’ Mayhew went on to note that the remaining Spitalfields weavers seemed resigned to their reduced circumstances and no longer had the energy to do anything about it: ‘In all there was the same want of hope – the same doggedness and half-indifference as to their fate.’
    Spitalfields was not the only area of the metropolis that was experiencing poverty on an unprecedented scale. Across the river, the ancient area of Bermondsey was experiencing similar problems, as this heartbreaking excerpt from a coroner’s report on the death of a poverty-stricken young woman shows: ‘she lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being no sheet or coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the doctor could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed. He then found it starved and scarred from rat bites.’
    Similar accounts of abject poverty began appearing regularly in the London press. Under particular scrutiny once again were the already notorious common lodging houses which, according to the journalists who visited them, had plumbed even greater depths. The scathing press reports, combined with the report from the Royal Commission forced Parliament to address the common lodging house problem and an act was passed in 1851 in a bid to improve the situation.
    In their wisdom, the politicians responsible for drawing up the act came to the conclusion that the common lodging houses caused problems not because of the wanton lack of facilities and the type of person that frequented them, but because they lacked supervision and clear rules and regulations. The new act stipulated that every common lodging house should have clear signage outside stating what the building was used for. Inside, every sleeping room should be measured. From these measurements, the number of beds allowed in each room would be calculated and a placard hung on the wall stating the allocation. Beds were to have fresh linen once a week and all windows were to be thrown open at 10am each day for ventilation purposes. All lodgers had to leave the lodging house at 10am and would not be allowed back in until late afternoon. These regulations were to be enforced by the local police.
    While the regulations imposed by the Common Lodging Houses Act were well meaning, they were at best badly thought out and at worst laughable. Measuring the rooms to allocate beds was all very well and good if only one person was going to sleep in each bed. However, it had been a long-standing practice for people to share beds in order to save money, thus doubling or even tripling the room capacity on particularly cold nights. The fact that each room had a sign stating the number of beds allowed was of virtually no use because few inmates could read and those that could were not about to report their only source of shelter to