The House by the Thames (24 page)

The real blight that the new rail links bestowed on Southwark was not the bridges themselves but the viaducts built to connect them with the London, Chatham & Dover's grandly rebuilt station at London Bridge. Soon Charing Cross and Waterloo too were connected to this hub, which swept St Thomas's Hospital away from its ancient site. The result was that old Bankside, which also suffered the Metropolitan Board of Works' divisive construction of Southwark Street in the mid-1860s, was now riven with railways trundling at rooftop level. The most damaging was the line that curved round from Blackfriars to London Bridge, carefully skirting the Anchor Brewery to avoid paying Barclay Perkins hefty compensation, but removing in its path the old Cure's College almshouses and graveyard, and rumbling above the Borough Market and the remains of the Bishop's palace to join the tracks from Cannon Street, before snaking round the south front of St Saviour's church as if it would throttle it.

Antiquarian interest in what had come to be known as ‘Old London' was well established by the 1860s, but its influential followers failed to protect Southwark's venerable parish church. It was just as well the old pile had managed to get itself rebuilt a generation before: had it still been as ruinous as Edward Sells proclaimed it to be in 1836, the power of the railway interests would surely have swept it away entirely. It is perhaps a measure of how far Southwark had fallen socially thirty years later that greater efforts were not made to route the railway further from the church. But it is also the case that in this same decade the view of St Paul's from Ludgate circus was defaced (for the next hundred and thirty years) by a railway viaduct, and that St Pancras old church very narrowly missed being demolished for the convenience of the Midland Railway's coaling yards. Progress, it was believed, must not be thwarted. The coach-routes had all been dismantled, and many of the old inns along with them; the last of the turnpikes were following them into oblivion. The old, all-purpose hackney carriages were replaced by the purely urban hansom cabs, and soon, where cattle had recently been herded, horse trams would come.

As if to distract attention from what their lines were actually doing to the old Borough, the L, C & D Railway Company made much of the large new hotel they were building at London Bridge. They were under the optimistic impression that there was an urgent need for accommodation in Southwark much grander than was supplied by those of the High Street inns that still survived. The planned Terminus Hotel had a hundred and fifty bedrooms, with bathrooms and water closets on each of its five storeys, lifts, restaurants, a Ladies Only coffee room separated by the library from the general coffee room, and – in a separate block – smoking and billiard rooms, which may have been more suited to the real needs of the typical customer arriving at London Bridge.

Too close to the City and to London as a whole to be a necessary staging post, too much surrounded by rough streets to attract the politer class of visitor come to stay for several days in the capital, the hotel never really flourished. It had descended in use to railway offices long before a bomb demolished it in the Second World War. The conception and building of it were redolent of the last era in which it was still imagined that railways somehow had a beneficial effect on the districts through which they passed.
The Builder
, which had written effusively about the plans for it in the summer of 1861, wrote in November of the same year and in the same enthusiastic but vague tone about the ‘many changes' scheduled for the Lambeth waterfront, which was a prolongation of Bankside:

‘… when the Main Drainage and embankment plans have been completed, rendering that which was in the memory of some few living a dreary and, in part, impassable marsh, dry and wholesome. The increased bridge and railway accommodation will also confer benefits … the locality will become more suitable for healthy dwelling and for the purposes of various descriptions of industry … wharfs [for] coal, stone, wood and many other materials crowd the once unprofitable land; shot and other factories … and matters too numerous in brief space to mention give employment to thousands.' (One senses that the writer had no real idea what he was talking about.) ‘The main thoroughfares are swarming with life, omnibuses, cabs and carriages …'

Three years later, the
South London Press
, Southwark's now-flourishing local paper, was extolling the newly opened Southwark Street (which cut a direct route from Borough High Street to Blackfriars Bridge Road) in similar if more focused terms. The Hop Exchange was then being erected, on what was predicted to become ‘one of the handsomest thorough fares in the metropolis … The frontage is of stone, with well-executed carvings, and the whole is being carried out by Mr Davies, builder of Union-street, at a cost of £10,000. A little distance further, on the right, we come to a building which, although plain in design, has a deal of interest attached to it, being the improved industrial dwellings for the working classes. This has been erected by a company, whose offices are at Carpenter's Hall, London Wall, and is now fully occupied by mechanics and their families. Each floor is almost like a house itself, and is furnished with every convenience. It is hoped, while ground remains to be disposed of in this street, that more of these dwellings will be established, giving, as they do, so great a boon to the working classes, hundreds of whom, through the improvements in Southwark, and the requirements of the various railway schemes, were forced to leave their dwellings …' And the rest of the column is about the numbers of warehouses, of similar dimensions to the industrial dwellings, newly built nearby.

Over the following twenty years many blocks of industrial tenements went up in Southwark, filling the censuses for the later decades of the nineteenth century with hosts of undifferentiated names and numbers. Most of them have now gone again, destroyed by bombs or by planners with other and different visions of socially desirable working class existence. One example of an early (1860s) block still stands, with its characteristic open stairs and iron balconies, cherished now again with paint and geraniums. It is just off Southwark Bridge Road in Redcross Street, not a stone's throw from where the supposed dust of the medieval Single Women lie beneath the Cross Bones ground.

But whatever the good intentions of housing philanthropists such as George Peabody and Octavia Hill (who was responsible for the erection of some more attractive, cottage-type workers' homes in the same street) there were many members of the Victorian working classes who did not earn steadily or respectably enough to aspire to the relatively high rents of Model housing. Or maybe they just preferred the old, familiar, individual courts, yards and alleys, even when these had trains lumbering overhead. They went on living their own lives on now-unregarded Bankside, in what seems to have become to official eyes little more than a series of spaces between ‘commodious modern blocks' and ‘fine new warehouses'. These remnants of lanes that were old when Shakespeare, Henslowe and John Taylor were young was the space left to them.

These people were not newsworthy, nor the subject of any plans: they were just there, in their own busy world, as the working classes of Southwark had been for centuries. They were lighter-hands, wharf-hands, coal-porters, rabbit-skinners, street-sellers, char-women, public-house pot-men, labourers, boiler-stokers; they were minor wage-earners in the breweries, the hop warehouses, the foundries, the soap works, the hatters, the tanneries. Chronically short of money but not destitute, as distinct from the ‘wretchedly poor' as they were from the respectable shop-keeping and clerking classes, they were much as they always had been. The only difference was that, by the mid-Victorian era, the immediate district of Bankside had been vacated by almost all those who had earlier provided an articulate, respectable, monied presence as counterweight and support: the Thrales, the Barclays, the Hornes, the Shalletts, the Potts, the Sells.

What had gone with them was a world of social cohesion, which had existed in spite of substantial class distances. It had been a world in which wholesale dealers in coals, potatoes or rice could see for themselves on their own doorsteps the hardships that a bitter winter could bring and were prepared to foregather in cold churches to make immediate plans for practical help – a world in which the coal-porters living in Cardinal Cap Alley and the Skin Market knew the current Mr Sells or Mr Horne as a neighbour and might rely on regular work from him. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1830s, Thomas Horne had tried without success to get a standard pay rate fixed for the porters so that they would not have to compete against one another when work was scarce. On the subject of this particularly illiterate and vulnerable class of worker, Henry Mayhew later wrote, ‘Of the kindness of masters to men, of discouragement of drunkenness, of persuasion of the men to care for the education of their children, I had the gratification of hearing frequently.' But he adds that there was no general structure of provision for these labouring men, when their muscle-power declined through age and when the copious draughts of beer that they all believed to be ‘strengthening' no longer had an effect.

After the middle of the century the masters, kindly or otherwise, even if still involved in Bankside industries, were more distant both geographically and socially. The old quarters of the metropolis were no longer a shared, familiar habitat: they were turning into ‘the slums', into ‘darkest London'. When interest was shown in ‘the plight of the poor' – which it increasingly was, as Victorian consciousness of the subject increased – it was the almost anthropological interest of the concerned outsider, writing as if bringing back despatches from another continent. ‘Missionary' societies were set up by clergymen to take religion, but also practical help and advice, to the less fortunate classes: exactly the same principle that was being applied in the burgeoning British Empire.

The mantle of Dickens who, in his early novels, had specifically shed light on some of the more oppressed corners of London, was taken on by journalists such as Mayhew and Hollingshed. Henry Mayhew's wonderfully comprehensive, deadpan articles were first written for the
Morning Chronicle
around 1850, and were published in book form some ten years later as
London Labour and the London Poor
. John Hollingshed's articles appeared in the
Morning Post
that same year, 1861, when the winter was particularly hard, and were eventually turned into a book called
Ragged London
. More of an indignant polemicist than Mayhew (he was particularly strong on the moral evils of over-crowding), he too provides valuable detail on everyday lives that would otherwise have gone unrecorded. Here he is on the houses immediately behind 49 Bankside, where he was taken by a local clergyman, secretary of the South London Visiting Relief Association:

‘Some of the houses in the courts about the Skin Market … have been built within the last twenty years. There is Pleasant place, where the rooms are only about 3 yards wide, the back-yard about 3 foot square, and the windows not more than 2 foot and a half square. The court or passage in front is in exact proportion to these dimensions, and the houses stand in 3 parallel rows with their faces to each other's backs … Each lets for about 4/
-
a week, and contains 2 of these confined rooms. In White Hind alley, near this place, there is a row of old black, rotten, wooden dwellings, chiefly rented by river thieves …'

Hollingshed's personal obsessions with Vice and Bad Air (as if the two were inextricably connected) can become wearisome, but he had a strong sense of place and accurately perceived the historical sequence by which old areas such as Bankside had reached the state they had by 1860. Under the heading ‘Mistaken Charity' he inveighs against the preservation of ancient almshouses, since ‘the field or country lane of the sixteenth, seventeenth or even the eighteenth century in which [the inmates'] original hermitages were built, has become a close street of busy warehouses, if not an alley of dirty hovels … Let anyone, in passing over London Bridge, towards Southwark, look down upon a squat row of cottages lying between St Saviour's church and the wharf warehouses of Messrs. Humphrey and others … New London Bridge and its approach from the south have raised a noisy roadway high above their heads, and wharf buildings, Bridge House hotel, and other places have towered up round them, until they seem now to live at the bottom of a deep brick well … huge packages seem always hanging over them at the end of cranes, threatening to fall and crush them.' Such buildings should be sold off, he declared, and the money used to maintain the old people elsewhere, where there were no passing costermongers or boatmen to call them ‘witches'.

Unlike some other writers of his time, who were content to emote and make their readers in Camberwell or Kensington feel guilty, Hollingshed understood that increasing charitable awareness of the great city's multiform social problems was providing only panaceas, not adequate solutions. England, he pointed out sardonically, spent more on charity than anywhere else in the world – ‘Nearly a million “cases” receive free medical advice and assistance in London alone every year. The hat is always going round. The first stone of some benevolent building is always being laid. We dine, we sing, we act, we make speeches in aid of a thousand institutions … Casinos, harmonious pot-houses and pugilistic exhibitions catch the benevolent infection and work like mill-horses to aid noisy soup-kitchens …'

The wheels of the world's greatest industrialised capital system turned, producing more spare wealth for more people in Britain than ever before, but the very nature of competitive trade was that some people got ground up in it or were simply left out. There was also the paradox, familiar already from the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth, that social evils were spoken or written of in scandalised terms as if they were something new, whereas really they had always been there and the fact that they were now being discussed was an indication that something was beginning to be done about them. People who were old by the mid-century, such as the radical working-class reformer Francis Place, were in no doubt that, as compared with the days of their youth, ordinary London people were far less likely to be scrofulous, rickety or lousy, far more likely to be wearing shoes and stockings and to be able to read. Fewer babies and children died. There was an abundance of cheap food and a whole network of soup kitchens, dispensaries, night shelters and Ragged Schools: many fewer poor people succumbed to absolute want. There was also generally agreed to be less roughness, violence and street theft than there had been a generation earlier: the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in the 1830s had been more successful than most people had expected. (Although not yet officially part of London, Southwark had had to accept the police.) These positive trends continued throughout the rest of the century and into the next one, when such wonders as free, compulsory schooling for all and old-age pensions began to be established.