The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

IN all great cities there are certain areas which bear an evil reputation. On the principle that birds of a feather dock together, the vicious and the criminal have a habit of seeking each other's society. But though crime and vice are frequently associated, there is often a sharp distinction to be drawn so far as certain quarters of London are concerned.

In the heart of the West End, in the Royal Borough of Kensington itself, there are whole streets in which the inhabitants are vicious, as we understand the word as a label. Here the police are busy, but the bulk of the charges brought against the women and the men are for drunkenness, for disorderly conduct, for fighting and brawling. They are principally night charges, for during the day you may wander the neighbourhood and see little life in the streets that are notoriously ill-famed.

There is one street that from end to end has not a single house in it where there is not a broken window. These houses are packed with a low type of humanity. Every house is a lodging-house, and many of them are lodging-houses for women only.

In the daytime drunken, dissipated-looking women loll in the doorways or thrust their tousled heads out of the upper windows. If you enter these houses and go down into the common kitchen you will find scores of women, young and middle-aged, sitting round the coke fires, listless, often morose. Among them you will see now and again women with traces of refinement, some whose features still bear the lingering traces of youth and good looks.

But they are lost souls every one of them. There is not one among the hundreds who crowd the notorious lodging-houses of this terrible guilt garden of the West who is still making an effort to earn an honest livelihood. Most of them are thieves when opportunity offers. They are not professional thieves, but many of them are in league with rascals of the worst type, loafers and hooligans, who are not ashamed to beat and maltreat women and force money from them.

This district is a district of despair to the philanthropist, the social reformer, and the Christian worker. It has been called the Avenue of the West. It is a cesspool to which all that is worst in the squalid vice of the capital flows. And the pity of it is that the stream is constantly fed by tributaries from the cleaner, greener land beyond. It is here that hundreds of our rural immigrants drift in ignorance or in despair of London's vastness and inhospitality, and here they rapidly deteriorate, and become in time as evil as their environment.

There is no mystery about the character of the people in these streets of shame. And yet the element of mystery greets you at every turn, whether you wander these byways of wickedness by day or by night.

If you would explore the mysteries of the Avemus, it is not in the houses or the streets that you will see the veil lifted.

But stand with me in this room in the school where the mentally and physically feeble offspring of degenerate parents are cared for and taught. Listen to the cry of a woman, who pours her heart out to the sympathetic teacher who has sent for her to give her advice about her little boy.

"It's the place, miss," wails the woman. "It's ruin to us all to be in it. It's ruined his father—it's ruined me, and it's ruining the children. If I could only get out of it! But I can't—I never shall now."