The 8 worst slums of Victorian London
Date post added: 4th June 2026
“The Old Nichols 1890 and 2016” by Jason C. McDonald is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Welcome to the slums of Victorian London
Dark, fetid, dangerous. Where poverty-stricken bodies crowd into poorly built tenements, or snatch a few hours of sleep in a doss house. Where open sewers trail through the slums, overflowing with bucket after bucket of slops. Where poverty and disease are rife and where infant mortality is shockingly high. Welcome to the slums of Victorian London in 19th century Britain.
How did people live in the slums of Victorian London?
The Victorian era was a time of extraordinary social change. Industrialisation meant huge urban population growth in London as masses of people migrated there from the countryside.
But this isn’t a tale of Dick Whittington. They didn’t discover riches once they landed in the big city. For most, it was a tale of urban poverty. Low incomes didn’t come close to meeting high land and housing prices. So they looked for or created cheap informal settlements, aka urban slums.
These city slums were hugely overcrowded. People were packed into small spaces. The fear of eviction was constant. Tempers ran high and domestic violence was common. As was child neglect.
London was overwhelmed by the rapid growth of slums and the increasing number of people within them. They were living in absolute squalor. This is not a time of en suites. Human waste literally piled up outside. It overflowed from holes in the ground. It flowed into the gutters and waterways. It stunk. It was unsanitary. It was foul.
What was the disease in the Victorian slums?
What do you get when you have overcrowding and a lack of sanitation? Yep, disease was rife.
In the Victorian era, outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid, flu and scarlet fever were common amongst slum residents. And then along came cholera to add to the threats to slum dwellers’ health.
Social reformer, Edwin Chadwick was the first to show that there was a direct link between poor living conditions, disease and life expectancy. He was appointed to the first Board of Health and became the Sanitary Commissioner of London in 1848. Chadwick championed the removal of human waste to improve the bad air that he blamed for ill health. Sounds like a good move doesn’t it? But London’s drainage and sewage systems weren’t up to the job. So the human waste flowed into the River Thames. That directly contaminated the water supply and even more people got sick.
The great British class divide
London’s East End was “terra incognita” to British upper and middle classes. They just didn’t go there. They didn’t want to know about it. Ergo the blind eye they turned to the squalor and overcrowding; the filth and crime the poor had to endure in “the worst slum in Europe.”
It was only in the late 19th century, when the living conditions of the poorest in society could be denied no longer, that the slums of Victorian London began to be acknowledged, talked about and depicted in newspapers like the Illustrated London News. Eventually, of course, the slum areas were cleared. Many of these areas becoming some of the most desirable in London.
Which were the worst slums of Victorian London?
1. St Giles Rookery
One of the worst slums in Victorian London was in the West End, close to Covent Garden. In 1101, Henry I’s wife Matilda founded a leper hospital here in fields outside the city walls, hence the name St Giles-in-the-Fields. It was in the 18th century though that St Giles earned its reputation for squalor and ruin when artist William Hogarth created his famous work Gin Lane based on St Giles. Depicting life as it was in the heart of slumland, Gin Lane paints a picture of despair, neglect and poverty. And it only got worse.
St Giles Rookery (rookery being a common term for slum housing) became lawless, filled with cadging houses and sordid dens. It was run by gangs and riddled with crime and prostitution. During the slum clearances, St Giles Rookery was cleared to make way for the New Oxford Street, joining Oxford Street and Holborn. Nothing of St Giles remains.
Curious about the nooks and crannies of this area? Join our Unseen Covent Garden walk
2. Devil’s Acre, Westminster
Visiting majestic Westminster Abbey today, it’s hard to imagine that Westminster was home to one of the worst slums in Victorian London. But don’t take our word for it. Charles Dickens wrote about the area known as Devil’s Acre, debunking the notion that Westminster was a ‘city of palaces, or magnificent squares, and regal terraces’. Instead, wrote Dickens, ‘there is no district in London more filthy and disgusting, more steeped in villainy and guilt, than that on which every morning’s sun casts the sombre shadows of the Abbey’. It was in Devil’s Acre that Dickens visited The Ragged Dormitory and the Colonial Training School of Industry, a place where young vagrants and thieves could supposedly trade their crime-ridden past for an honest future. Some say that it was Dickens’ visits to the ‘Ragged School’ that inspired Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. With a spell as an Irish rookery, Devil’s Acre was a place where pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes and sharpers converged.
We explore this area and tell terrible tales of Devil’s Acre on our Central Westminster walk
3. Whitechapel
Home to many of London’s poor, from the working classes right down to the destitute, Whitechapel was plagued by overcrowding, crime and deprivation. The Charles Booth poverty map of the late 19th century showed this clearly, colouring huge swathes of Whitechapel black (‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminals’) dark blue (‘very poor’) or light blue (‘poor’). Lodging houses were created to shelter the homeless overnight, with minimal facilities – often not even privies. But, as more bodies were packed in, conditions were abysmal and many chose instead to walk the streets. And of course, it was the East End alleyways of Whitechapel that Jack the Ripper stalked, searching for his next victim. Walk those Whitechapel streets with us on our nightly Jack the Ripper walk
4. Frying pan alley, Spitalfields
Jack London was a 26-year-old American journalist whose interest was roused by the plight of the poor. In the 19th century, many of the world’s cities, like New York, were blighted by slum housing. From a poor background himself, Jack became fascinated by London’s East End. He spent weeks exploring the poorest parts of London, sleeping in workhouses, experiencing Victorian London slum living conditions first-hand. He poured it all into his book The People of the Abyss.
One such story is Jack’s visit to a ‘sweating den’ in Frying Pan Alley, Spitalfields. He describes walking on its ‘slimy pavement’ and into an ‘abomination’ of a house, up a narrow and foul stairway ‘heaped with filth and refuse.’ Jack was greeted with tiny rooms, each with a large desk taking up most of the space. 20 people were crammed around it, surrounded by the detritus of shoemaking. In another room, a young boy lay dying of consumption. From the window, Jack recalls the ‘one storey hovels’ where people lived, roofs covered in filth, fish and meat bones and the ‘general refuse of a human sty’. Frying Pan Alley still exists to this day, although you’ll find it much changed from the Victorian era.
5. Jacob’s Island, Bermondsey
Located on the south bank of the Thames, the rather glorious sounding Jacob’s Island was anything but. Jacob’s Island was another of the Victorian London slums that caught the attention of Charles Dickens. He chose it as the spot for Bill Sykes to meet his end. Set beside the polluted River Neckinger, ‘the very capital of cholera’, Jacob’s Island was a notorious rookery.
It was to the Bermondsey slums that journalist Henry Mayhew was despatched in 1849 to report on a cholera outbreak. Author of London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew conducted first-person interviews with London’s poorest. This area was bombed extensively in World War II – 19th century slum clearance compliments of the 20th century Luftwaffe! But there’s still trace evidence – the outlines of Jacob’s Island and even the feel of Jacob’s Island. If you know where to go and where to look – and we do on our Undiscovered London, Shad Thames, Butler’s Wharf walk.
6. Bethnal Green
Earning a mention in George Sims’s book How The Poor Live and Horrible London, Bethnal Green was the poorest area of London in Victorian times and a known rookery. Old Nichol slum (on Old Nichol Street, just off Shoreditch High Street) was particularly squalid. It had the lowest class housing consisting of tenements with walls running with damp.
In 1889, Charles Booth found that 45% of the Bethnal Green population lived below the basic subsistence level – the highest percentage in London. In his 1896 novel, A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison portrayed the Old Nichol as ‘for one hundred years the blackest pit in London’.
The later slum clearances completely transformed Bethnal Green. But you can still find clues to this area’s fascinating slumland past, if you know where to look.
7. Notting Hill Potteries and Piggeries
Today, Notting Hill is one of London’s most desirable addresses. But in Queen Victoria’s time, it was awash with filth. Described by Dickens as ‘a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London.’ The Potteries and Piggeries (formerly known as Cut-throat Lane) earned its name when pig keepers and rowdy brick makers moved into the area. Slum dwellers slept in their hovels, alongside their animals, lacking even basic sanitation.
It was in Notting Hill that Peter Rachman, a notorious provider of slum housing, owned properties. Indeed, ‘Rachmanism’ became a term for landlords exploiting tenants with slum housing and a total lack of security of tenure.
For the Potteries and Piggeries and much more besides, try our Notting Hill & Portobello Market walk.
8. Southwark
Just south of the Thames, Southwark still bears the scars of its furtive, villainous, 19th century past. There are sites from the paupers’ burying ground to a ragged school. Then there’s the prison that marked Charles Dickens for life and inevitably found its way into his fiction.
Southwark was a melting pot of London’s poorest souls. It was home to the chimney sweeps and the prostitutes, the soon-to-be-executed Black Maria, the pickpockets and the street sellers. Then, of course, there was the body snatching gang. The St. Saviour’s Union Workhouse on Mint Street is believed to have been yet another source of inspiration for the works of Charles Dickens. The Lancet describes the women’s ward of the workhouse as ‘a miserable room, foul and dirty’, ‘the floor being simply bedded with straw’ and a ‘den or horrors’.
Walk the walk and talk the talk of Victorian London
Our Darkest Victorian London walking tour will transport you back to these horrific times. Don’t worry, we won’t make you endure privies and open sewers, we’ll point out better facilities en route. The walk takes place on Monday mornings at 10.45am, starting at Monument underground station.
Discover the plight of poverty-stricken children at this time. Our Children of Outcast London revisits these London streets and tells their tales. This walk can be taken as a private tour.
David Tucker
David – the Seigneur of this favoured realm – broods over words, breeds enthusiasms and is “unmanageable.”* He’s a balterer, literary historian, university lecturer, journalist, logophile and lifelong thanatophobe. For good measure, he’s the doyen of London guides.
Pippa Jackson
Pippa is a word nerd and content aficionado with a background of working in TV on both sides of the globe. She loves to discover and share the diverse and wonderful stories of her much-loved London. When she’s not writing blogs and articles, you’ll find her walking beside the Thames or even paddleboarding on it (in the finest of conditions only!) or enjoying a coffee in the sunshine with a good book.