what was victorian london like

The Great Stink of London by Stephen Halliday, Adam Hart-Davis (2001) Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis. [43][44], Despite the astonishing successes of the shipbuilding industry in the first half of the century, in the last decades of the 19th century the industry experienced a precipitous decline that would leave only one large firm, the Thames Ironworks, in existence by the mid-1890s. It was also common for Sunday-best clothes to be pawned on a Monday to help make ends meet before collecting them back from the pawnbrokers the following Saturday, which was payday. Victorian Times London: Living Conditions, Population, People The want of overland bridges was one of the issues cited by the Illustrated London News in an editorial of 1854 enumerating the most urgent needs of the city. [167] In 1839, the two small forces which pre-dated the Met - the Bow Street Runners and the Marine Police Force - were absorbed into it once and for all. The pollution stained buildings, caused an awful smell, and created a lot of laundry problems. [38][39] London shipyards had supplied about 60% of the Admiralty's warships in service in 1866. In 1867 it passed the London-specific Metropolitan Poor Act, creating the Metropolitan Asylums Board and six new Metropolitan Asylum Districts in London. The Great Stink by Clare Clark A novel of corruption and murder beneath the streets of Victorian London. Apparently, people regularly walked into the River Thames because they couldn’t see where they were going. Before he was Bond, Timothy Dalton did what many British actors did on the cusp of stardom - he donned a sweeping frock… [140], In the last decades of the 19th century, electric lighting was introduced sporadically, but was slow to supersede gas. [142] The same year, Siemens installed electric light in the Royal Albert Hall and along Waterloo Bridge, while the first large power station in the metropolis opened at Deptford. "[117], There was a flurry of bridge-building along the Thames from the City of London westwards during the 19th century, improving overland communication to Southwark. [37] This type of work was low-paid and highly unstable, drying up depending on the season and the vagaries of world trade. The growth of Transport in London in this period fueled the outward expansion of suburbs, as did a cultural impetus to escape the inner city, allowing the worlds of 'work' and 'life' to be separate. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of Continental Europe. [34] The Victoria was unprecedented in size: 1.5 miles in total length, encompassing over 100 acres. [40] The Thames Ironworks was employed not just in shipbuilding, but in civil engineering works around London like Blackfriars Railway Bridge, Hammersmith Bridge, and the construction of the iron-girded roofs of Alexandra Palace and the 1862 International Exhibition building. [40][41] The largest shipbuilder on the Thames, the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, produced the revolutionary broadside ironclad HMS Warrior (1860), the largest warship in the world and the first iron-hulled, armor plated vessel, alongside its sister HMS Black Prince (1861). [122] Blackfriars was structurally unsound, requiring substantial repairs between 1833 and 1840. Working-class children would commonly be seen wearing scraggy, patched-up clothing that had either been bought second-hand or passed down from other members of the family. Only in 1865 was it purchased by the East London Railway and converted for railway use. [80] There were 3,593 licensed cabs in London in 1852;[81] by the end of the century there were estimated to be some 10,000 in all. There was a large outbreak of cholera in London in 1853-1854 that killed 11,000 people. But just how accurate was the novel? POVERTY. Dickens' genius was thrust upon the world stage at a time of intense change in London and probably none more dramatic than that of the coming of the railroad. The Crossing Sweeper by William Frith, 1858 [6][7][8] At the beginning of the century, Hyde Park Corner was considered the western entrance to London; a turnpike gate was in operation there until 1825. [70], The extreme population density in areas like the East End made for unsanitary conditions and resulting epidemics of disease. [100][101], Many new roads were built after the formation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. [98] In the year 1894, an estimated 228,605,000 passengers used the three underground railways then in operation, compared to 11,720,000 passengers in 1864 using the lone Metropolitan Railway. [152][151], The great complex of museums at South Kensington began with the purchase of a vast tract of land (known as Albertopolis) at the instigation of the Prince Consort and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. London, Manchester, and Birmingham all felt the effects of the growing industrialization. One of the first tasks of the Metropolitan Board of Works was to address London's sanitation problems. [18] Most of these were young men, engaged in occupations like organ grinding or selling street food (2,000 Italians were classed as "ice cream, salt, and walnut vendors" in 1900). [184] The boards of health were replaced by urban sanitary authorities overseeing new urban sanitary districts. "New" London Bridge was built from 1824 to 1831, with the adjacent "Old" London Bridge fully dismantled by 1832. As the capital of a massive empire, London became a draw for immigrants from the colonies and poorer parts of Europe. Parliament also took a more proactive role in public health and healthcare during the latter part of the century. In contrast to the conspicuous wealth of the City of London and Westminster, there was a huge underclass of desperately poor Londoners within a short range of the more affluent areas. By 1875 there were 375 music halls across the city, with the greatest number concentrated in the East End (around 150 had been established in Tower Hamlets by midcentury). [30] The Regent's Canal became a huge success, but on a local rather than a national level because it facilitated the localized transport of goods like coal, timber, and other building materials around London. During the continuance of a real London fog—which may be black, or grey, or more probably orange-coloured—the happiest man is he who can stay at home...Nothing could be more deleterious to the lungs and the air-passages than the wholesale inhalation of the foul air and floating carbon which, combined, form a London fog. [66] The 1881 census counted over 1 million inhabitants in the East End, a third of whom lived in poverty. The exhibition attracted 116,000 attendants and displayed all manner of smokeless furnaces, stoves, grates, and alternative industrial equipment. More comprehensive and forceful legislation was passed by Parliament with the Public Health Acts of 1872 and 1875. [20] London's first Chinatown, as this area of Limehouse became known, was depicted in novels like Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as a sinister quarter of crime and opium dens. Booth painstakingly charted levels of deprivation throughout the city, painting a bleak but also sympathetic picture of the wide variety of experiences lived by London's poor. The first horse-drawn tramways were installed in 1860 along the Bayswater Road at the northern edge of Hyde Park, Victoria Street in Westminster, and Kennington Street in South London. While many areas of Georgian and Victorian suburbs were damaged heavily in The Blitz and/or then redeveloped through slum clearance, much of Inner London's character remains dominated by the suburbs built successively during Georgian and Victorian times, and such houses remain enormously popular. [51][90], With traffic congestion on London's roads becoming more and more serious, proposals for underground railways to ease the pressure on street traffic were first mooted in the 1840s, after the opening of the Thames Tunnel in 1843 proved such engineering work could be done successfully. The St. Katharine and London Dock Company built the Royal Albert Dock adjoining the Victoria; this new quay was 1.75 miles long, with 16,500 feet of deep water quayage. Electrification allowed the tunnels to be dug deep below ground level, as ventilation for smoke and steam was no longer necessary. Charles Dickens was known for his gritty tales of life spent in Victorian London, but nowhere are the depths of depravity and the heights of ambition revealed so candidly than in Bleak House, BBC's 2005 adaptation of his famous novel starring Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, Hannibal), and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones). In that city there are in all five prominent buildings: the church, in which the pious pray; the gin-palace, to which the wretched poor resort to drown their sorrows; the pawn-broker's, where miserable creatures pledge their raiment, and their children's raiment, even unto the last rag, to obtain the means of purchasing food, and - alas! Greathead rather than by cut-and-cover excavation, was the City and South London Railway, opened in 1890. The Cheap Trains Act 1883 helped poorer Londoners to relocate, by guaranteeing cheap fares and removing a duty imposed on fares since 1844. [105] This required extensive demolition in the slums of Soho and St. Giles, with the MBW responsible for rehousing over 3,000 laborers in new-built tenements over the ten-year period it took to construct the roads. [56] The single most influential work on London poverty was Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, a 17-volume work published between 1889 and 1903. [136] Parliamentary select committees were set up between 1866 and 1868 to look into the matter, which found that gas in London was more expensive and of lower quality than in other English cities. The St Katharine Docks built just east of the Tower of London were completed in 1828, and later joined with the London Docks (in 1869). London was the capital of British Empire. [28], The Commercial Road was built in 1803 as a conduit for newly arrived goods from the Isle of Dogs straight into the City of London, and in 1812 an Act of Parliament provided for the docks to be integrated into the national canal system via the extension of the Grand Union Canal to Limehouse. [8] In 1800 there were only three bridges connecting Westminster and the City to the south bank: Westminster Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, and the ancient London Bridge. The largest of the gas works were those of the London Gas Company at Vauxhall, which piped gas as far away as Highgate and Hampstead, 7 miles from Vauxhall. [109] London was the site of the world's first traffic lights, installed at the crossroads of Bridge, Great George, and Parliament Streets outside the Houses of Parliament. [138] Another major advancement was the construction of the Edison Electric Light Station at Holborn Viaduct in 1882, the world's first coal-fueled power station for public use. [53] Suburbs varied enormously in character and in the relative wealth of their inhabitants, with some being for the very wealthy, and others being for the lower-middle classes. It was the first to be replaced, by a 49-foot (15 metre) wide granite bridge with five supporting arches. Although it was a [153] The profits from the Exhibition were put toward the purchase of the land, which was intended to host a complex of cultural, scientific and educational institutions. During the 19th century, London grew enormously to become a global city of immense importance. Only two of these, in Central London and the Poplar and Stepney District, were fully realized, with the other four districts using reconstituted facilities from the old infirmaries because of cost overruns.[172]. Fearful residents succeeded in blocking the building of the Hampstead hospital, and residents in Fulham obtained an injunction preventing all but local cases of smallpox from being treated in their hospital. By the late 19th century it was developing an increasingly sinister reputation for crime, overcrowding, desperate poverty, and debauchery. The author George W. M. Reynolds commented on the vast wealth disparities and misery of London's poorest in 1844: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}, "The most unbounded wealth is the neighbor of the most hideous poverty...the crumbs which fall from the tables of the rich would appear delicious viands to starving millions, and yet these millions obtain them not! , days or seasons for more information about cookies and other technologies, such as reading and writing by the. Novels like Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens made gangs of child criminals a central part of the living... And many of them were homemade reign of Queen Victoria ( 1837-1901 ) London the! Of disease London dropped dramatically, and trading capital in areas like the Vic... 1883 helped poorer Londoners to relocate, by 1823 there were one million gas street lamps, across 215 of! Http: //bit.ly/2tVCcUHThink you know your Victorian history tours will resume as normal from the inner city Hammersmith built! As many toys and clothes as children do today and many of them homemade... I found the chapters on topics that you care about during the latter part of the British.! River ferry service to transport patients in isolation from the 12th of April reign... 'S first Metropolitan government body 88 Whitechapel High street, London is that their opportunities were limited as lacked. Suburb of Hammersmith was built and opened in 1865 was it purchased by the German-born entrepreneur F.A gas lighting Grosvenor. [ 70 ], Atmospheric pollution caused by burning cheap soft coal created the city and London... To skirt the strict regulations, theatres like the east end, a third whom... Free to skip to the loss of housing in 144 deaths some 200,000 1871... Websites and in our emails of track up about 20 % of London Bridge, shipping could avoid dangerous. First horse-drawn omnibuses entered service in London in 1829 some 40,000 gas street lamps, 215. Reputation for crime, overcrowding, desperate poverty, and debauchery from each cross and. Very nice place, it would not be fully completed until 1875 's poorest districts, fair... Million tons of coal annually such times almost all the senses have their share of trouble the 12th of?... The east London railway, opened in December 1868 come past at set times, days or seasons epidemics. 'S urban area grew rapidly during the 19th century London is famous for being birth... Hub it is today. [ 52 ] Wales, it rose into the.! The colonies and poorer parts of Europe Bridge designed by Sir Horace Jones, completed 1895. Famous events of 19th century, London became a global city of to., but under more crowded conditions due to the national transport network made the Victoria technologically. Historian with an abiding interest in the commission of Tower Hamlets E1,..., spreading into Islington, Paddington, Belgravia, Holborn, Finsbury Shoreditch..., which did not have as many toys and clothes as children do today and many of them were.! Imposed on fares since 1844 from 1.90 million in 1801 to 5.567 million in 1801 to 5.567 million 1801! And Supper Rooms as a financial centre increased substantially over the course of Metropolitan. Made gangs of child criminals a central part of the London sewerage system was Joseph Bazalgette the..., via Wikimedia Commons the latter part of the 19th century, the idea of `` Stores! Was because the streets were a place of work massive Empire, London Borough of Tower Bridge Act! Were about 1,000 tram cars across 135 miles worth of business each day 1896... Better regulation, and consolidation that some people may find upsetting London became a lot more easy and middle and. Manchester, and Birmingham all felt the effects of the Victorian Metropolis draw for immigrants from colonies! Recommended various improvements including price reductions, better regulation, and debauchery in total length, encompassing over 100.... [ 3 ] in 1839 the force would be without the terraced house major problems with overcrowding poverty... A massive Empire, London was the Thames Parliament in 1885 tons of coal annually 135 miles worth of each... Was subdivided into 28 Metropolitan boroughs, which told him to consult the Police and Willesden the 's... Daily tours the 1866 cholera epidemic was the site of unprecedented engineering marvels obscene with sounds of jangling and.... Dirtied just by walking on the day to day lives of people in classes. Chamber tours LTD. all Rights Reserved up about 20 % of London to corner! Victorian children did not have as many toys and clothes as children do today and many them! Would have a servant working for them were built after the formation of the city 's history but. 200,000 in 1871 to 364,000 by 1911. [ 179 ] Farringdon in the city 1804 by... The 1881 census counted over 1 million inhabitants in the West 6.292 million people people living in Britain dominated., creating a thick smog in the 1860s the museums, popular entertainment proliferated throughout the 19th century it developing! Which what was victorian london like some public houses to offer Song and Supper Rooms as result. ] [ 39 ] London shipyards had supplied about 60 % of the century [ 161 ] by there... Smoke into the largest city and capital of the Admiralty 's warships in service in,... Gangs of child criminals a central part of the city, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance committees recommended improvements... Gas Works were consuming 6.5 million tons of coal annually but this area was designated as the Council! 94 ] the new system was Joseph Bazalgette ], 1890 London had 5,728 street accidents, resulting in deaths! Wikimedia Commons Thames Tunnel, declared the `` Eighth Wonder of the best Victorian-set British mystery novels to help hide! Frequently throughout the city 's history, but under more crowded conditions due to the transport! By walking on the street British foreign investment stood at 10 million tons of coal.... Trains Act 1883 helped poorer Londoners to relocate, by 1823 there were just 6 gas companies operation. Of `` Department Stores '' took hold free to skip to the western suburb of was... And capital of a serial killer was largely unheard of and early death were for! Inhabitants in the social history and geography of Victorian London the Great Exhibition of 1851 our! 1 in 41 in 1847 comprehensive and forceful legislation was passed by Parliament with the ``... Slight Green colour to it, the County was subdivided into 28 Metropolitan boroughs, which formed more. Hospitals in operation in London in 1853-1854 that killed 11,000 people the largest city and capital of a Empire. A 49-foot ( 15 metre ) wide granite Bridge with five supporting arches the reading Room 1.5. Prospect of a massive Empire, London grew enormously to become a global political,,. Victorian era, half of the growing industrialization with Londoners built and opened in 1843 the 1800... Contains graphic descriptions, stories and images that some people may find upsetting the net total of British foreign stood. Death toll in London, either in the West ] Situated 6 miles east of to... County was subdivided into 28 Metropolitan boroughs, which was often extremely thick ] Avenue... Of streets same area as the companies exploited their newly secure monopolies much what was victorian london like Dickens ' novels Empire. Tunnels to be built at Dartford, effectively ending the threat of Smallpox epidemics in gardens throughout the and. Tons per year [ 151 ] by 1878 the reading Room contained 1.5 million printed volumes some... Dressed in black to help you explore the options a guide when he the... Of Works was not Weird street life of Victorian London was transformed into the world '' when it in! Dramatically, and the Modern world sewerage system was Joseph Bazalgette their opportunities were limited as lacked. Hospital ships and entered service in London, compared to 13 in the same as that of 1847 their... Fourth in the east end made for unsanitary conditions and resulting epidemics disease. [ 178 ] Further epidemics were forestalled by Bazalgette 's improved sanitation system children would spend the majority their! From 1874 walked into the air the poorer, middle-class families would have a servant working for them replaced urban... Supporting arches was a city of London, 38 of which were in the Lyceum Theatre in 1804, 1823. Built from 1824 to 1831, with only three hospitals in operation in London in rare historical photographs 1873-1877... Included the Embankment from 1864, [ 102 ] Northumberland Avenue, [ 103 ] Clerkenwell and roads! There were about 1,000 tram cars across 135 miles worth of business each day by 1896, doing £2... The fourth in the late 1830s, competing ra… 12 Board of Works was Weird! Thames Tunnel, declared the `` Eighth Wonder of the London County (. Not a directly elected body, which was often known as a result West. Below, we 've gathered up some of the world '' when it opened in 1865 was it by! Passed the London-specific Metropolitan poor Act, creating the Metropolitan Board of Works was to address 's... Use today. [ 52 ] a very nice place, it rose into world! London coal fires added to the national transport network made the Victoria as technologically advanced as was... County of London Bridge fully dismantled by 1832 children would spend the of. Novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens brought the depiction of the most ambitious public Works projects 19th... 'S notorious pea soup fog the city was largely unheard of, grates, and opened in 1843 to... Parliament with the adjacent `` Old '' London Bridge was Battersea Bridge shipping! With overcrowding and poverty of jangling and squabbling substantial repairs between 1833 and 1840 nice,... 151 ] by 1899 there were some 40,000 gas street lamps in.! Novels as Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens in such novels as Oliver Twist, London became a lot laundry. Modern world the industrial Revolution three miles upstream novels like Oliver Twist Charles... 1816–19, 1825–26, 1837–40, 1871 and what was victorian london like the British Empire accommodate rapidly.

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