East London

by Walter Besant

First it was sore throat, then it was something else, and from house to house it was spread, and the doctor came and went, and in the broad bed of the little room lay four children sick at once; their soft, white skins were hard and dry and red; their brains wandered; the mother, with haggard face, bent over them.

It is all over now; three of the children lie in the new cemetery; the man has got a house at last; he will not get back his children, nor will the two who are left to him ever be again what they once were. This is one story out of the thousands which may be told of the people who live in the crowded quarters.

Another cause of overcrowding springs from the bad building of the workmen’s houses. It is not only the foundation that is rotten: the house itself is built of bad brick laid in single courses, the woodwork is unseasoned and shrinks, zinc is used instead of lead, the stairs are of matchboard—only the cheapest and worst materials are used. There are laws, there always have been laws, against bad building; there are inspectors, yet the bad building continues. A man who had been an apprentice in the building trade told me how this surprising result of our laws and our inspectors used to be possible twenty-five years ago. “It is this way,” he said; “I was a boy when these houses were built. For a house like this it was £15 to the inspector; for one of the smaller houses it was £10.” We must not believe it possible for such a thing to happen now; one’s faith in human nature would suffer too severe a blow, but when one looks around in certain quarters that little transaction between the honest builder and the faithful inspector recurs to my unwilling memory.

In course of time authority interposes. The houses are condemned. Out go the people, with their sticks, into the street; the houses are boarded up, the boys throw stones at the windows; the place is deserted. But where are the people to go?

There is a riverside parish entirely inhabited by the lowest kind of working-people, chiefly dock laborers and casuals and factory girls. There are literally no inhabitants of a higher class, except the clergy and a few ladies who live and work among the people. There was until recently a population of eight thousand in this parish. But street after street has been condemned; the houses, boarded up, their windows broken by the boys, stand miserably waiting to be pulled down; the parish has lost three thousand of its population. Where have they gone? Nobody knows; but they must go somewhere, and they have certainly gone where the rents are higher and the crowding worse.

Or the London County Council, becoming aware of the insanitary condition of a whole area, condemns it all, en bloc, takes it over, pulls down the miserable tenements and erects new buildings in their place. Nothing could be better; everybody applauds this vigorous action. Yet what happens? I will show you from a single example.

There is an area of fifteen acres in Bethnal Green, one of the worst and most overcrowded parts of London. It contains twenty streets, all small; there were 730 houses, and there were 5719 people. About a third of this army lived in tenements of one room each; nearly a half lived in tenements of two rooms. This area has been entirely cleared away; the London County Council turned out the people, and built upon the site a small town whose streets are fifty feet wide, whose houses are five stories high; water and gas are laid on, workshops are provided, there are only thirty one-room tenements, there are only five hundred of two rooms, and so on; the rent of the two-room tenements is six shillings a week; the center of the area is occupied by a circular terraced garden. Nothing could be better. Moreover, to crown all, the cost of the whole will be repaid to the ratepayers by means of a sinking fund spread over sixty years.

BUT—what became of the five thousand while these fine palaces were being built? Did their condition improve? Or did it become worse during the period of construction? They were turned out; they had to go somewhere; they imposed themselves upon districts already overcrowded, their habits most certainly grew more careless and more draggled, their condition most certainly grew worse. How many of the five thousand will come back to the old quarters and enter upon the civilized life offered to them? I know not; but the experience is that the former occupants do not return.

London in all directions is now thickly planted with the huge, ugly erections called model lodging-houses, workmen’s residences, and barracks. South London, across the river, is especially rich in these erections. Drury Lane, the historic Drury Lane, once the home of Nell Gwynne, the site of the National Theatre, accommodates a vast number of people in its barracks; it is favored also with two playgrounds for the children; both are disused burial grounds—one of them is the burial ground in “Bleak House.”

Opinions vary as to the success of these buildings. Their advantages at first sight appear overwhelming. Step out of a Drury Lane block into one of the courts beside it and a dozen advantages will immediately be perceived by all your senses at once. It is a great thing to be clean if you like cleanliness; to have a sanitary house if you like fresh air; to have conveniences for washing if, unlike Dr. Johnson, you prefer your linen to be clean. But there are certain losses about the block building. I do not say that they are greater than the gains. It has always been the instinctive desire of the Englishman to have his own home, to himself, separate. It is a survival of the early Anglo-Saxon custom when each family formed a settlement to itself. The working-man would like to have his cottage and his bit of garden, and to enjoy his own individuality apart from the rest of the world. In the block he loses this distinction; his family is one of fifty, of a hundred; his children are part of a flock, there is no more distinction among them than in a flock of sheep. There are great dangers attending the loss of the individual; it tends to destroy ambition, to weaken the power of free thought, to injure the responsibility of self-government. This loss is a very great danger among a people whose whole history illustrates the value of a sturdy assertion of self, of personal independence, of responsibility, and of a continual readiness to revolt against any encroachments of authority. For these reasons many regard the barrack or block system with suspicion and dislike.