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Home | The Crime | The Law | The People | The Evidence | Find Out More
The people
In the hundred years from 1800 to 1900, the population of London rocketed from one to six million and the British Empire covered one third of the globe. Grand Regency buildings, such as the John Nash-designed surroundings of Piccadilly Circus were erected for the elite at the same time as many of the poor still lived in overcrowded squalor.
Children as young as five made a living begging or sweeping chimneys and their education did not become compulsory until 1870, when five- to 12-year-olds were legally required to attend school. Although the novels of campaigners, such as Charles Dickens, did much to alert the public to these conditions, improvements came slowly.
At least in part because of the vast disparities in living conditions between the rich and poor there was growing interest in republican movements during some periods of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901 and the flames of this interest were fanned by her reputation for being aloof.
Nevertheless, grand engineering and architectural schemes were the order of the day. After being burned down in 1834, the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in their current neo-gothic style by Charles Barry and August Welby Pugin. Big Ben’s clock tower was built in 1859. The first railway in London was built from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1836 and other stations followed at Euston in 1837, Waterloo in 1848 and elsewhere. The first major line, from London to Manchester, was constructed in 1842 and in 1863 the first underground railway - from Paddington to Farringdon - was completed.
The centre piece of 1851’s triumphant exhibition for the world fair was Joseph Paxton’s vast glass and steel structure - the Crystal Palace - initially built in Hyde Park and then moved to Sydenham in south London. The sight attracted 200,000 visitors. The telephone was invented in 1876 and the first electric power station was unveiled in 1888.
At the same time as these advances in technology and trade, movements for social progress saw all male householders get the vote in the Second Reform Bill in 1867. And the last public hanging came the following year. Women gained increasing rights.
South of the river
It was James Boswell, in his famous London Journal, who wrote: ‘At the bottom of the Haymarket I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was sated, I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low wretch.’
This illustrates perfectly the 18th century attitude towards life around the river and the prostitutes who were common throughout the capital - an attitude that persisted to the Victorian era. One area, though, was particularly associated with the sex trade: the south bank of the river, Southwark and Lambeth, and the featured crime scene, Waterloo.
Surprisingly, in the Middle Ages the area was regarded as a place of great beauty, with parks, open spaces and well-heeled houses. Later Southwark grew in importance as the town on the southern end of the only bridge across the Thames: London Bridge.
As London’s population grew from hundreds of thousands to millions by the 19th century, this image became tarnished. Prostitutes and crooks moved into the inns and the geographical separation of both Lambeth and Southwark from the main part of London north of the river meant that the arm of the law was often not quite long enough to keep it under control. Many of the inhabitants were working class people who had come to London in search of work and, down on their luck, fell to crime or prostitution.
Superficially the houses on Waterloo Road and Blackfriars Road were grand, but behind them were warrens of cheap housing thrown up earlier in the 19th century. By the 1830s, this whole area of Waterloo was known as Whoretaloo.
The police
There was no organised police force as we know it today until 1829 when widespread concern at rising crime levels in the industrialised and overcrowded cities led Sir Robert Peel to set up London’s force. By early in the next decade the force had swelled to 3,300 men and there were horse patrols.
Much of the work of the new force involved dealing with mobs. Emphasis was more on crime prevention than on crime solving.
In 1845, the Police Commissioners aimed to have one policeman for every 450 of the population. Officers had to cope with many of the problems we associate with today’s London. In one year in the mid-19th century there were 14,000 robberies.
Jack the Ripper
More than almost any other case, the murders of Jack the Ripper haunted the capital for the last decade of the Victorian era. In just a few months from August to November 1888, no less than six prostitutes were murdered and mutilated in the East End of London.
When the whisper of a serial murderer on the loose was first heard, public faith in the police was already at a low point. A demonstration over unemployment in 1887 became known as Bloody Sunday after police came down with force, causing considerable injuries and reported deaths.
Under attack by the press for having given up on crime prevention in favour of bullying the unemployed, police became concerned that there was a connection between the murder and mutilation of Mary Ann Nichols in August 1888 and the frenzied stabbing a matter of weeks earlier of Martha Tabram. Pressure was increased with a third murder and the revelation of letters from Jack the Ripper confessing to various murders. The identity of the killer, or killers, remains a mystery.
Health
Health was an overriding concern for the Victorians, not least because health and hygiene conditions in many areas were so poor.
In the 1830s and the 1840s there were two influenza epidemics and outbreaks of an array of diseases including typhus and typhoid. An outbreak of cholera in late 1831 killed 52,000 people. Shocking symptoms ranged from violent vomiting to acute abdominal pains. Spread by contaminated water, its victims were mainly the poor.
Control of diseases was made more difficult by the large movement of people through cities set in train by, among other factors, the Irish Potato Famine of 1846. And inadequate housing and facilities to serve growing city populations left the poor particularly vulnerable to the spread of disease.
For every person who died of old age or violence, eight died of diseases, according to studies during the period. Given the numbers perishing from illnesses with the symptons of vomiting and diarrhoea, intentional poisonings may not have been easy to spot.
Average life expectancy was as low as 37 in London, but it was money that created the differential. Crowded London areas such as Bermondsey, Whitechapel, and Shoreditch had mortality rates twice as high as their middle-class neighbours.
Sanitary facilities, such as baths and water closets were almost unheard of in many areas, and sewers often leaked, supplemented by waste flowing down from wealthier estates erected on higher ground. In many parts of the capital, water supplies were unreliable.
The 1848 Public Health Bill set up a central authority to develop and ensure the delivery of essential services, such as waste disposal and water supplies. But much of this was based on the incorrect belief that disease was spread by awful smells, such as produced by the heavily polluted Thames, and invisible noxious gases. There was no understanding of the importance of clean water in itself.
When the connection was finally made, Joseph Bazalgette designed the essential sewage system of tunnels to pipe the waste out of the capital. Health improved and towards the start of the 20th century the introduction of inoculations helped further in preventing the spread of disease.
But if disease didn’t get you, something else would. Food poisoning was rife and people were, without knowing it, being poisoned all the time through lead water pipes, wall paints and food-processing equipment.
Additives, such as alum (an aluminium-based chemical) were sometimes used in foods to make them look or taste better. It was not until 1860 that the first Act was passed to prevent food sellers or manufacturers selling unfit food and / or adding toxic substances to their products.
Industrial accidents and diseases, from lung problems to circulation, were common, but unrecognised or ignored, since they left the lawmakers largely untouched. However, everyone’s health was affected by the appalling air quality brought about by domestic coal fires and belching factory chimneys.