Vol. 1. Chapter 6 - From Rookery to Elephant and Castle

Alice had come from a background of poverty and had even spent time in the Fulham Workhouse.  Thomas, the father of her child, was himself born in the Workhouse. The illegitimate son of Louisa Ward, he was from one of the most notorious slums of Victorian England: The Rookery – in St. Giles in the Fields.  The Rookery stood between St. Giles church and Great Russell Street (Now home to the British Museum) and Seven Dials near where Centre Point stands today. It is where Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street meet.

It had once been home to a leper colony, the gallows had been situated there, and it was here that in 1665 that the Great Plague of London started. It was of one of the worst slums within Britain, a site of overcrowding and squalor, a semi-derelict warren. From Georgian affluence in the 18th century, the area declined rapidly, as houses were divided up, many families sharing a single room. Irish Catholic immigrants seeking to escape desperate poverty in Ireland took up residence and the slum was nicknamed "Little Ireland" or "The Holy Land". My mother always said that she thought that there was some Irish blood in the family.

The expression "a St Giles cellar" passed into common parlance, describing the worst conditions of poverty. Open sewers often ran through rooms and cesspits were left untended. Residents complained to the Times in 1849 : "We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place."

St Giles parish, immortalised in Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’. The rookery was a maze of secret alleyways, gin shops, home to a relentless tide of immigrants, coiners, prostitutes, thieves and addicts of varying kinds, pickpockets, cadgers, and beggars, it became a pit of lawlessness and violence. Archaeologists recently found one of the infamous secret passages, which meant the police – if they dared venture in – found it almost impossible to catch criminals, who could escape through a maze of escape routes through, over and under buildings

The Rookeries embodied the worst living conditions in all of London's history; this was the lowest point which human beings could reach. One outsider recorded in 1852 – when the area had slightly improved: "In a back alley opening onto Church Street was a den which looked more like a cow-house than a room for human beings – little if any light came through and yet 17 human beings ate drank and slept there; the floor was damp and below the level of the court; the gutters overflowed; when it rained, the rain gushed in at the apertures."

The reformer Henry Mayhew described the slum in 1860 in A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood: The parish of St. Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a byword as the synonym of filth and squalor. And although New Oxford Street has been carried straight through the middle of the worst part of its slums—"the Rookery"—yet, especially on the south side, there still are streets which demand to be swept away in the interest of health and cleanliness… They [are] a noisy and riotous lot, fond of street brawls, equally "fat, ragged and saucy;" and the courts abound in pedlars, fish-women, newscriers, and corn-cutters." As the population grew, so did their dead, the area a home to cholera and consumption.

“How many who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?”

- The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens

At the time when Fat Granny, Louisa Ward, gave birth to Thomas, the area was being cleared in order to improve the transport routes of the Capital, The Rookery dwellers were not re-housed by the authorities but were simply evicted. 5000 people were thrown out onto the street. Many just moved into nearby slums, such Devil's Acre, (where Skinny Granny was brought up).  Others, like Louisa, escaped south of the River to The Elephant and Castle.

Coming soon.... Chapter 7, "Vinegar Yard".