There have always been slums here, even before the Sanctuary rabble and after. The streets lying about Tothill Lane, however, which were slums from the beginning, only began in the sixteenth century. The map of Anthony Van den Wyngeerde (A.D. 1543) shows only a few houses standing round about the Sanctuary in the northwest corner of the inclosure; there is a crowd of houses between King Street and the river, and on the west there is nothing but open country: that part of the City which contained the most infamous dens and the vilest ruffians, which was called the “Desert” of Westminster, lying to the south of Tothill Fields, grew up and ran to waste and seed in the course of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth we reaped the harvest of that seed; at the end of the nineteenth we are still pulling up the weeds and planting new flowers and sowing better seed.
The “Desert” was bounded on the north by Tothill Street, Broadway, and Petty France, all with their courts—their sweet and desirable courts; its southern boundary was the Horseferry Road; the Abbey lay along the east; and the western marsh was the fringe of Tothill Fields, now marked by Rochester Row, or perhaps Francis Street. A little remains—here a court, there a bit of street—to mark what the place was like.
Hear what was written about Westminster so late as the year 1839 (Bardsley on “Westminster Improvements”): “Thorney Island consisted chiefly of narrow, dirty streets lined with wretched dwellings, and of numerous miserable courts and alleys, situate in the environs of the Palace and Abbey, where in the olden time the many lawless characters claiming sanctuary found shelter; and so great had been the force of long custom that the houses continued to be rebuilt, century after century, in a miserable manner for the reception of similar degraded outcasts. The inhabitants of these courts and alleys are stated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth ‘to be the most part of no trade or mystery, to be poor, and many of them wholly given to vice and idleness.’ And in James I.’s time ‘almost every fourth house is an alehouse, harbouring all sorts of lewde and badde people.’ And again: ‘In these narrow streets, and in their close and insalubrious lanes, courts, and alleys, where squalid misery and poverty struggle with filth and wretchedness, where vice reigns unchecked, and in the atmosphere of which the worst diseases are generated and diffused.’”
In the little space of a thousand feet by twelve hundred, the courts were sometimes so narrow that the people could shake hands across; the tenements were
LOVING CUP PRESENTED TO THE GUARDIANS OF ST. MARGARET’S, WESTMINSTER, BY SAMUEL PIERSON, IN 1764.
sometimes built of boards nailed together; there were no sanitary arrangements at all; there was no drainage; typhus always held possession; and actually under the very shadow of the Cathedral were gathered together the most dangerous and most villainous wretches in the whole country. Old Pye Street, Orchard Street, Duck Lane, the Almonry, and St. Anne’s Street were the homes of the professional street beggar and the professional thief. No respectable person could venture with safety into these streets.
They are now quite safe; the people are rough to look at, but they are no longer thieves and cut-throats by calling. Let us take a short, a very short walk about the Desert. Alas! its glories are gone; the place is not even picturesque: Vice, we know, is sometimes picturesque, even in its most hideous mien. Orchard Street has one side pulled down, and the other side presents a squalid, dilapidated appearance in gray brick; it was once a fit entrance for the most wicked part of London. The streets into which it leads—Great St. Anne’s Street, Pye Street, Peter Street, Duck Lane (now St. Matthew Street) are all transformed. Huge barracks of lodging-houses stand over the dark and malodorous courts; the place is now no doubt tolerably virtuous, but the artist turns from it with a shudder. There was a time when these streets were country lanes, having few houses, and no courts; at this time many pleasant, ingenious, and interesting persons lived in this quarter. For example, Herrick the poet and Purcell the musician lived in St. Anne’s Street. But we have already condemned the catalogue of connections. He who seriously studies the streets learns the associations as he goes along.
Outside these streets stretched Tothill Fields and Five Fields. These fields were to Westminster much as Smithfield and Moorfields were to the City of London. Anything out of the common could be done in Tothill Fields. To begin with, they were a pleasant place for walking; in the spring they were full of flowers—the cuckoo flower, the marsh mallow,