Family History 1.2

Miseries of London, 1807, by Rowlandson

By the 1840s the conditions in the Rookery, close to where the family lived in Hyde Street, had become so bad that the committee looking after slum-clearance considered it the worst in London. The Rookery was between New Oxford Street and St Giles High Street. In fact, the name of St Giles had become synonymous with the worst kind of slum and criminal environment.

Hyde Street was in St George's  parish, Bloomsbury, not St Giles, so our family escaped the

Location of Hyde Street, 1878 Ordnance Survey map

bad reputation, but it was a close shave.









Satirical sketch of St Giles, 1788, by Ramberg





Some families even lived entirely in a cellar, underground, entered by a trap-door. St Giles was notorious for being a place where criminals were trained, just as Fagan in Oliver Twist trained the boys to be pick-pockets.

In 1844, Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels wrote about St Giles: "The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken....."


So a plan was developed to link the eastern end of Oxford Street (at Tottenham Court Road) with Holborn in what was named New Oxford Street. Something like 10,000 people who were living crowded into the Rookery area were tossed out of their homes with nowhere to go, while the owner of most of the derelict buildings, the Duke of Bedford, was paid over 100,000 pounds in compensation. This process was virtually completed by 1847.

In spite of the clearance for New Oxford Street, it was not till the 1880s that St Giles was completely rebuilt and the overcrowding ended. This was when Church Lane was finally demolished; that was where many of the refugees from the Rookery ended up in the late forties.

These were the conditions a few hundred metres from where the family spent most of the first half of the nineteenth century.