On a recent guided walk around King’s Cross, I found myself in an area known in the 19^th century as Agar Town, now long since vanished from the map of London. I was intrigued to know where it had gone, and why?

Named after the lawyer William Agar, to whom the site was let in 1840, Agar Town was the name of the district behind what is now St Pancras Station. An eminently respectable-sounding Victorian suburb – with streets called Canterbury Place, Durham Street and Oxford Crescent – it

1851 map

occupied a wedge of land sandwiched between the railway lines leading to King’s Cross and Euston stations.  If the inhabitants of Somers Town (which bordered Agar to the south and west) were considered “low” and “working-class”, those of Agar Town were seen as the personification of abject poverty. Little more than a shanty town, housing in Agar Town consisted most of small, ramshackle tenements and conditions were terrible. The local vestry failed to provide “Ague Town”, as it soon became known, with street lighting or cleaning. There was also no sewerage, and the place quickly became associated with filth and disease. Despite having a population of around 5,000 people by 1847, there was no school, church or chapel other than the Old Saint Pancras church which was in the process of being restored. Eventually a temporary iron church was therefore erected in Agar Town, along with a Ragged School in Old Pancras Road. Building of a permanent church began in 1859, but it was never completed.

Frederick Williams, in his "History of the Midland Railway” (1875), draws a particularly unprepossessing picture of Agar Town before the redevelopment of the area: "Old St. Pancras churchyard was invaded, and Agar Town almost demolished. Yet those who knew this district at that time have no regret at the change. Time was when the wealthy owner of a large estate had lived here in his mansion; but after his departure the place became a very 'abomination of 

Paradise Row in Agar Town

desolation.' In its centre was what was termed La Belle Isle, a dreary and unsavoury locality, abandoned to mountains of refuse from the metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what once had been fish, or occupied by knackers'-yards and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap-manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and brick-kilns. At the broken doors of mutilated houses canaries still sang, and dogs lay basking in the sun, as if to remind one of the vast colonies of bird-fanciers and dog-fanciers who formerly made Agar Town their abode; and from these dwellings came out wretched creatures in rags and dirt, and searched amid the far-extending refuse for the filthy treasure by the aid of which they eked out a miserable livelihood; whilst over the whole neighbourhood the gas-works poured forth their mephitic vapours, and the canal gave forth its rheumatic dampness, extracting in return some of the more poisonous ingredients in the atmosphere, and spreading them upon the surface of the water in a thick scum of various and ominous hues. Such was Agar Town before the Midland Railway came into the midst of it."

Other writers and commentators queued up to pour scorn on the slums of Agar Town. Charles Dickens weighed into the discussion, calling the area ”our English Connemara”, a reference to the poverty found all over rural Ireland at this time. Yet despite its reputation as a place where only the “lowest of the low” lived, recent research suggests this has been much exaggerated. For example, census records of 1861 shows that there were skilled artisans among Agar Town’s residents, including more than a few cabinet-makers, wood turners and piano makers.

Demolition of Agar Town
 

 Whatever the true demographic of this notorious district, there was no escaping the far-reaching changes that lay just around the corner. In 1866 the Midland Railway Company approached the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, then landlords of Agar Town, with an offer of almost 20,000 pounds to take the place off their hands with a view to large-scale demolition. The “clearance”, including the half-finished church, was completed within just two months. In all, 4,000 homes were destroyed to make way for goods yards and gas holders, and a population of around 32,000 people was displaced. The neighbourhood soon became a scene of chaos, with massive mounds of débris from both the demolished houses and the tunnels being dug for the railway. The (mainly) weekly tenants were evicted without compensation.  

And so a whole district was effectively wiped from London’s map. By the time Charles Booth drew up his poverty map in 1889, there was no sign of Agar Town.  Its name is, however, today commemorated by Agar Grove (originally called St Paul's Road, Camden Town), a road that runs along the edge of where Agar Town used to be. Cambridge Street, once the centre of Agar Town, has a new identity as Camley Street, now home to a popular nature reserve.

 

References:

1.   http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol5/pp368-373

2.       Working paper: Mapping Poverty in Agar Town - economic conditions prior to the development of St Pancras Station in 1866 by Steven P. Swensen (2006):  http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22539/1/0906Swensen.pdf

3.       Article: From Cripplegate to Agar Town: inside London's vanished neighbourhoods (2015): http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/24/london-vanished-neighbourhoods-cripplegate-agar-town-limehouse-chinatown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peabody – ideal and reality

The Peabody Trust, which today still houses large numbers of people, was formed in 1862 “to ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness.” Such was the significance of these buildings in the history of working-class housing that many of the surviving older Peabody estates have been awarded Grade ll listed status, including those at Blackfriars, Islington, and Shadwell.

Peabody Square, Blackfriars Road

As the 19^th century progressed, housing the working classes of London was the most pressing problem after health. By 1850-80 it had become a major social issue, part of the general development of a ‘social conscience’. Slum conditions in the Victorian period were dire, with districts such as Seven Dials and St Giles becoming notorious. Slum clearance was necessary to make way for the new roads and railways that were being built at this time, and to accommodate a population that had quadrupled during the second half of the 19^th century - the numbers swelled by immigration from Ireland and of Jews from eastern Europe. Overcrowding was not just the result of demographic pressures and low housing supply, but of displacement of the working class: the City was fast becoming non-residential and the building of docks resulted in the demolition of thousands of houses. But dock building was not the only cause of displacement – public works also caused the wholesale demolition of working class housing, e.g. the building of the Law Courts, the Embankment and Holborn Viaduct, not to mention railway buildings. Weekly tenants (such as those displaced from Agar Town for the building of St Pancras station) were not entitled to compensation on being evicted. It is documented that in 1844 almost the entire working population of Whitechapel and Aldgate lived in one room. Up until this time, no-one had been interested in building for the lower classes – few capitalists saw the poor areas of London as likely to provide a return on their investment, which is why early attempts to solve the housing problem were made by wealthy individuals or charities.

It was against this backdrop that the concept of ‘model housing’ came into being, providing clean homes for rent by workers (as opposed to the destitute or very poor who were left to the workhouse). Founded in 1844, the ‘Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes’ took the lead, followed in 1845 by the ‘Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious’. Other such organisations came into existence in the 1850s and 1860s. By the latter part of the century there were over 30 ‘model dwelling’ companies and trusts operating in London. Many of these, however, were small-scale initiatives that had little effect… until the arrival of George Peabody in 1862.

George Peabody came from near Boston in the US and was himself of humble origins. He set up

his own export business, building up the cotton trade between the US and Lancashire. He visited Britain for the first time in 1827, and by 1838 had made London his primary home. He then left the export business to concentrate on merchant banking. Between 1862-9, Peabody donated over £500,000 towards establishing the Peabody Trust, aimed at helping Londoners who were poor but ‘of good character’. He died in 1869 and a statue was unveiled outside the Royal Exchange in Threadneedle Street. His funeral was held in Westminster Abbey – the only American to be accorded that honour. A plaque there reads (his own words): “I have prayed my Heavenly Father day by day that I might be enabled before I died to show my gratitude for the blessings which he has bestowed upon me by doing some great good to my fellow men.” Evidence of Peabody’s legacy in bricks and mortar can be found all over inner London…

 

Commercial Street

The first Peabody building was erected in 1864 on the corner of Commercial Street and Folgate Street in Spitalfields. It consisted of 4-storey blocks round a central courtyard. The exterior was sparse, the interiors (by our standards) utilitarian. In all there were 40 flats, with laundries, drying areas and baths on the top floor, plus covered playgrounds for the use of children in wet weather. The size of the flats varied from one room (2s 6d) to a set of 3 rooms for 5s. All lavatories and washing facilities were on the landings outside the flats and the interior walls were bare brick – tenants were forbidden to paint or paper them. Cooking was done on small coal ranges and lighting was by candles or rush lights (gas was only for the upper classes!) Rubbish went down a chute on each landing. By 1870, further estates had been opened in Islington (1865), Shadwell (1866), and Chelsea (1870). Between 1871 and1885, 12 more were built. By 1880 the Peabody Trust had invested over half a million pounds in working class housing and by the end of the century the Trust’s blocks were all over London – Spitalfields, Islington, Shadwell, Westminster, Chelsea, Bermondsey, Blackfriars, Southwark, Pimlico, Clerkenwell and Whitechapel. By 1875 nearly 4,000 people were living in the comparative luxury of Peabody properties which were surrounded by tall iron railings with gates that were locked at night.

In terms of design, Peabody buildings (all those pre-1900 were designed by Henry Darbishire) have a characteristic, some would say barrack-like, quality. Features such as bleak corridors, small windows, tiers of iron galleries round a large inner courtyard are typical. As Michael Jenner observes, this was “the architecture of stern paternalism and social control”. Often sited in the heart of slum areas, these buildings were intended to act as “bastions of respectability to protect the occupants from the depravity which still lurked on the doorstep.” Boodle, agent for the Grosvenor and Northampton estates, stressed that model dwellings provided “a good example of cleanliness and decent behaviour in the whole neighbourhood”. The medical officer for the St Saviour’s district board of works described model blocks as “small plots of civilisation, cultivated in the midst of a wide waste of barbarism”. As grim as many thought they looked, such block dwellings were generally deemed a considerable improvement on the slums they replaced. And there is no denying that they had a proven effect on health. According to the Report of the Trustees of the Peabody Donation Fund of 1893, the death rate among residents was 17.6 per thousand people, 3.7 per thousand below the average for London. Infant mortality was 126.4 in every thousand births, 37.9 below the average figure for the whole of the city.

However, there were also fears expressed about the blocks. Not only were they felt to be impersonal, it was believed that segregating the working classes could encourage the galvanising of a common identity, leading possibly to the fomenting of revolution. There were also fears of possible epidemics, and that high-density living was morally harmful. Dr Tidy, medical officer of health for Islington, declared that “congregation always rears degeneration”. One critic described the buildings as ‘family packing cases’. William Morris called them ‘bastilles’, though he did also concede that the existence of a common garden and other amenities at least promoted a sense of communalism. The Daily Telegraph declared them to be “a cross between the reformatory and workhouse style” with their gloomy passages and pokey rooms. And yet there is evidence to show that the barrack-like appearance of the blocks did not deter prospective tenants. In 1885 there was a waiting list of up to two years for a Peabody property.

By far the biggest complaint was that the blocks were not housing the class for whom the crisis was most acute – the labouring class. Peabody housing was designed for skilled workers and small tradespeople (the ‘aristocracy of the working classes’), not the very poor, and applicants were carefully screened for suitability. Originally Peabody barred tenants who earned over 30 shillings and less than 12 shillings. This meant that the rents were too high for the casually employed or manual labourers. Added to this, those who qualified were required to pay their rent in advance and provide an employer’s reference, both of which, by definition, were impossible for casual workers. Despite these criticisms it’s clear that the Trust provided rooms at rents lower than those in the immediate neighbourhood – often two rooms could be had for little more than the price of one room in surrounding streets, hence their popularity.

The emphasis with Peabody housing was unashamedly on respectability and, to this end, there were rules of conduct for each estate. The success of the Peabody project rested on the effectiveness of the individual superintendants of the properties. He (or sometimes she) dealt with regular inspections of the property, applications for rooms, collection of all rents, and the enforcement of Peabody’s rules.  The brief was clear: “Firm discipline [should be] maintained, for without it tenants will not only be careless in the matter of rent, but careless and destructive of the property”. “Drunkenness, sexual laxity and financial fecklessness were outlawed, cleanliness and order were ordained. Intolerance of rent arrears alone insured that only those workers in stable employment […] could get and keep their rooms.” According to Edward Bowmaker in The Housing of the Working Classes: “Residence in the Peabody buildings is an undeniable certificate of character”. Many of the rules were aimed at good community health: no applications for rooms to be entertained unless every member of the applicant’s family has been vaccinated. Passages, steps, closets and lavatory windows had to be washed every Saturday and swept every morning before 10am (this to be done by the tenants in turn). Washing was only to be done in the laundry. Tenants were required to report to the superintendant any births, deaths or infectious diseases occurring in their rooms. Any tenant not complying with this rule would receive notice to quit.  

So, did Peabody and his like solve London’s housing crisis? The truth is that the model dwelling movement fell far short of housing all those who needed somewhere to live. It failed not because of a lack of capital or low dividends but because of the sheer magnitude of the task it had undertaken. Yet the movement did leave an impressive legacy. Without the houses it provided, many working class people would have had little hope of bettering their domestic standards. These dwellings, close to the inhabitants’ workplaces, were a real boon. They were solidly-built and much better equipped than most other working-class dwellings.  They have also proved amenable to modernisation, which explains why many are still standing when so much experimental ‘modernist’ social housing has failed. And, thanks to the trustees’ initial insistence that there should be a return of at least three per cent on all its investments, the Peabody Trust continued and today is the oldest and largest housing association in London, managing 27,000 homes housing 80,000 people. And it is still building affordable homes - George Peabody’s legacy lives on.

 

 

References:

www.peabody.org.uk

The East End Nobody Knows E. Jones

London in the 19^th century Jerry White (blog: https://londonhistorians.wordpresscom )

London Heritage Michael Jenner

The Housing of the Working Classes Edward Bowmaker (1895)

The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London Anthony S. Wohl (2009)

Victorian London Liza Picard (2005)

The London Doré Saw: a Victorian Evocation Eric de Maré (1973)

Peabody Buildings Rules: visual courtesy of Westminster City Archives

 

 

On a recent walk around Shoreditch I came across this handsome-looking building on Hoxton Road. It turned out to be part of a Victorian workhouse….

Shoreditch Workhouse

Parish Relief Offices in Hoxton Road

Under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 what had been known as ‘outdoor relief’ (i.e. money, food or clothing given to people in their homes) was replaced by the workhouse. All parishes were required to provide a workhouse. Many smaller parishes pooled their resources to be able to do this, uniting parishes into ‘Poor Law Unions’, administered by a local Board of Guardians. A major building programme began and by 1850 London had 30 workhouses.

Block A

In fact, the parish of St Leonard’s in Shoreditch already had its own workhouse before this law was passed, completed in 1777. However, by 1847, inspectors found the building badly overcrowded and insanitary. Major modernisation followed in 1849, including a new infirmary wing on Hoxton Street. Then in 1861 the Board of Guardians commissioned a new workhouse and an infirmary with 350 beds on the same site, together with a health centre at the Hoxton Street end of the site. Completed in 1866, this is the building we see today. The main block of the new building on Kingsland Road (Block A) contained the administrative offices and accommodation for female inmates. It is built in the grand French Second Empire style much used in mid-19^th century town halls, stations and commercial buildings. The exterior features lots of carved stonework, tall mansards with patterned slate coverings and decorative iron cresting, unusual in buildings intended for use by the poor. To its rear,

Dining-hall and day rooms from the north
 

Block B is more austere and contained the dining hall, which doubled as a chapel – central to institutional life - and dayrooms. Male accommodation was located at the west end of the building. The Parish Relief Offices (completed before the rest of the building in 1863) fronted onto Hoxton Road. In 1871, the Shoreditch Guardians made further alterations to provide an infirmary and dispensary in a separate building at the north-west of the site (now demolished).

Shoreditch workhouse site c.1873
 

Poverty was rife in Shoreditch throughout the 19^th century and, as everywhere in London, there was a chronic shortage of housing for the very poorest. This situation was further aggravated by the construction between 1867 and 1887 of large numbers of factories and warehouses, to make way for which many local people had to be evicted. But even those living in the meanest of hovels (such as Shoreditch’s notorious Old Nichol slum) would do their utmost to escape the feared workhouse.            

Charles Booth's poverty map
 

                                                                  

The 1881 census records the following: of the 676 inmates of St Leonard’s workhouse around half were widows or widowers and around 70% were over 60. The regime was a harsh one - after all, these were ratepayer-funded institutions. The rules, uniforms and regimentation underscored the principle that this type of relief was for the truly destitute, not the merely indolent. Regular prayers were said. Meals consisted mainly of bread, cheese and gruel, with meat served three times a week. Inmates took their meals sat on long benches, all facing forwards.

Segregation was strictly observed – not only were men and women separated, but parents and children too. Though the law was later relaxed to allow couples over 60 to stay together, evidence shows this was a rare concession. Inmates wore coarse, heavy uniforms. Discipline was strict and misdemeanours severely punished.






Men were put to work stone-breaking and women did oakum-picking. For this the paupers got no pay but received instead a meagre food allowance - 4lb of bread (if married) plus a 2lb loaf for each child.

Stone-breaking
 

Oakum-picking
 

 

Despite the people within its walls being designated ‘inmates’, the workhouse was not a prison – you could leave whenever you wished. Some people were known as “in and outs” (those who entered whenever they hit hard times), but for many their stay lasted forever.

                                                                                    The Shoreditch workhouse survived until 1930 when the LCC took over and incorporated its buildings into the infirmary which later became known as St Leonard’s hospital. In 1934, the buildings were condemned but WW2 halted any improvement work. It remained a general hospital until 1984 when the in-patient facilities were closed. It has since been developed as a primary care centre for the coordination of community services. Both Blocks A and B, and the Relief Offices building are Grade ll listed.

References:
Info/map/workhouse plan: http://www.workhouses.org.uk
Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets (2009)
Liza Picard, Victorian London, The Life of a City (2005)