London's "Second" Nation

London's "Second" Nation

"Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."

Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or The Two Nations

Such was the population with whom Morley was about to mingle. Wodgate had the appearance of a vast squalid suburb. As you advanced, leaving behind you long lines of little dingy tenements, with infants lying about the road, you expected every moment to emerge into some streets and encounter buildings bearing some correspondence in their size and comfort to the considerable population swarming and busied around you. Nothing of the kind. There were no public buildings of any sort; no churches, chapels, town-hall, institute, theatre; and the principal streets in the heart of the town in which were situate the coarse and grimy shops, though formed by houses of a greater elevation than the preceding, were equally narrow and if possible more dirty. At every fourth or fifth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide and streaming with filth, opened out of the street. These were crowded with dwellings of various size, while from the principal court often branched out a number of smaller alleys or rather narrow passages, than which nothing can be conceived more close and squalid and obscure. Here during the days of business, the sound of the hammer and the file never ceased, amid gutters of abomination and piles of foulness and stagnant pools of filth; reservoirs of leprosy and plague, whose exhalations were sufficient to taint the atmosphere of the whole kingdom and fill the country with fever and pestilence.

Government Intervention

Hygiene

• 1833 The first Factory Act provides first small regulation of child labor in textile factories. 1834 Poor Law created “poorhouses” for the destitute.
• 1835 106,000 power looms operating in Great Britain.
• 1844 Friedrich Engels publishes his observations of the negative effects of industrialization in The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
• 1848 British government sets up the General Board of Health to investigate sanitary conditions, setting up local boards to ensure safe water in cities.
• 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
• 1849 10,000 people die in three months in London from Cholera epidemic.
• 1875 Public Health Act gives government responsibility to ensure public health for housing and sewage.

During the first decades of Victoria's reign, baths were virtually unknown in the poorer districts and uncommon anywhere. Most households of all economic classes still used "privy-pails"; water closets were rare. Sewers had flat bottoms, and because drains were made out of stone, seepage was considerable. If, as was often the case in towns, streets were unpaved, they might remain ankle-deep in mud for weeks. For new middle-class homes in the growing manufacturing towns, elevated sites were usually chosen, with the result that sewage filtered or flowed down into the lower areas where the laboring populations dwelt. Some towns had special drainage problems. In Leeds the Aire River, fouled by the town's refuse, flooded periodically, sending noxious waters into the ground floors and basements of the low-lying houses.

Social Intervention

Social Services

Sanitation

George Peabody was a social visionary, with views far ahead of his time. He was one of a circle of reformers; his contemporaries included Lord Shaftesbury, William Cobbett, Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens.

That vision and sense of social justice has shaped us. We pioneered social housing with such unheard-of luxuries as separate laundry rooms and space for children to play at a time when the capital had some of the most horrific slums in Europe.

Our first estate, in Spitalfields, was opened in 1864. Since then, we have grown to house more than 70,000 people and continue to build on our pioneering history, adapting to the changing needs of Londoners with innovations in affordable, sustainable housing.

In the 1830s and the 1840s there were three massive waves of contagious disease: the first, from 1831 to 1833, included two influenza epidemics and the initial appearance of cholera; the second, from 1836 to 1842, encompassed major epidemics of influenza, typhus, typhoid, and cholera.

How did Parliament respond?

Since it was widely believed that disease was generated spontaneously from filth (pythogenesis) and transmitted by noxious invisible gas or miasma, there was much alarm over the "Great Stink" of 1858 and 1859. The Thames had become so polluted with waste as to be almost unbearable during summer months. People refused to use the river-steamers and would walk miles to avoid crossing one of the city bridges. Parliament could carry on its business only by hanging disinfectant-soaked cloths over the windows. It should have been a blow to the theory of pythogenesis when no outbreak of fever ensued from this monstrous stench. As late as 1873, however, William Budd could reluctantly report in his important book on typhoid that "organic matter, and especially sewage in a state of decomposition, without any relation to antecedent fever, is still generally supposed to be the most fertile source."