Dear diary,
Into London is an urban setting, but what does a typical street in London 1800 look like? Who can you meet there?
Quick info
London is a booming town.
London is a dirty town. Mud on the street, soot and fog in the air.
The Thames stinks, full with garbage and excrements.
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| Busy London Street |
Population
Population information shapes how a city looks: 1814, London is growing. A lot.
From just under a million in 1801, the population of London booms to 1,3 millions in 1811 (Greater London area).
Increase the population of any city by ~20% within a decade: there are bound to be problems, scarcity of living quarters, high rental prices, and infrastructure cannot be build quickly enough to support the influx of arriving population.
The 19th century is also the time of the beginning of the industrialisation: not only housing projects are being built, but also production plants. Not all industrial barons built housing for their workers, and not all workers want to live in a building owned by their boss.
So, good housing is scarce (most people live in very cramped situations), commercial housing also.
That’s why a lot of people work on the street (which is considered normal), and seldom spend time at home, apart from meals and sleep. Children play on the street and that’s viewed as normal too.
Immigrants
A lot of the newcomers in London are from the rural areas of Great britain. You can certainly find people from all over them empire in London, but the biggest group among the immigrant population are, by far, the Irish.
Sure, a native-american, a french-cajun, an ex-slave from african descent (esclavage was abolished 1807 by the the Slave Trade Act in the empire) are an odder sight, but most people in London will associate migrants with “Micks” (derogatory term for the irish, apparently all named “Michael”).
Streets
1814, roads and streets in London are a mess:
The parishes were responsible for their maintenance, there was no money for the work, so once a year, a “voluntary” reviewed the streets, on top of his normal job, with nearly no pay. Be sure he did an appropriate work (this can be compared to the work every citizen has to do in the Watch).
The street and roads in and around the other bigger cities (like Liverpool) were in better shape than London’s, which first started to use the McAdam process of road building in 1815.
The easiest way to get goods into the city was by waterways, the Thames or a canal (at Brentford).
Fish from the North Sea was transported by horse pack train, even though it was quickly perishable, at about the same speed as back when the romans ruled over the island.
But once the goods had arrived on the granite docks, bringing the goods within London was a big challenge: potholes, treacherous mud pools, narrow streets, too high loads for the street and the axles of the carts were daily hassles.
The paved streets themselves were muddy and stinking. The rudimentary sewer system was only used to drain the rain water, and everything landed, in the end, in the Thames, which was a stinking hell, full of detritus, garbage, animal carcasses, and even corpses. The banks of the River are a must every morning for corpses robber, and the Bow Street runners a few minutes later.
Toilets
As said before, the sewer system back in 1814 is only meant to drain the rain water. Every building in London has it’s own “cesspool”, ideally in the garden around back, but often in the basement. “Cesspools were built to be porous so the liquid part of the waste was meant to seep away into the ground. There was no knowledge of bacteriological contamination, although there was plenty of it happening. Nevertheless, you had this residue of solid matter left and it was removed by so-called ‘night soil men.’" (Dirty Old London, The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson)
At least, human feces did not land on the streets, but horse dung, mud, and rain were enough to make the london streets a slippery stinky slop, in which you’d better be in a cart, on a horse, or at least wearing good boots.
By law, the ‘night soil men’ had to work at night (because of the unbearable stink - and the societal taboo around toilets) but could make a good living out of the residue, selling them as fertilizer to farms in the countryside around London.
Sources
- On immigrants: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp
- On streets: https://www.londonhistorians.org/index.php?s=file_download&id=64
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