Enjoy this London's Seamy Side... chapter from "Imperial London", a unique view of London and its inhabitants, first published in 1901, by Arthur H. Beavan.

I refer not merely to offshoots from main roads, but to the network of by-streets and alleys lying between our great thorough­fares which form districts in themselves.

The explorer will have no difficulty in finding them - there are plenty to choose from.

But though they abound in every direction, I mention a few localities as especially representative.

For instance, between Edgware Road and Park Road, Regent's Park - i.e. in any of the streets off Lisson Grove, - sordid life can be readily studied.

Anywhere between Great Portland Street and Tottenham Court Road is a sure "find"; also off Gray's Inn Road, and between the Euston Road and Judd Street.

The Kingsland Road, Mare Street, Hackney, and the Bethnal Green Road, are surrounded with back-streets; so are the King's Road, Chelsea, the Westminster-Bridge Road, and the neighbourhood of Waterloo Station and the Elephant and Castle.

Walworth and Camberwell have many such by-ways, and they are much en evidence round Covent Garden Market, notably in Bedfordbury.

These are not slums.

They are simply the varying forms of the shabby, the seamy side of London, and possess uniform characteristics.

The houses are chiefly one story, or at the most two stories high; the shops, small, and such as minister solely to the necessities of life: butchers', who deal in cheap New Zealand mutton and inferior beef; fishmongers', whose stock-in-trade is of uncertain age, with mussels and whelks, and every kind of dried fish well to the fore; pork-butchers', and ham-and-beef shops, generally of superior size, and well patronized; "purveyors" of cow-heel and ox-cheek, of tripe and trotters, their windows innocent of provisions until the day's "boiling" or "dressing" is accomplished, then overflowing with these popular dainties; fried-fish shops, very much to the front up to all hours of the night; and general-dealers, who sell anything from firewood to tinned salmon; public-houses, of course, but of a subdued order, with plate-glass, paint, and gilding waiting to be renewed.

Should the back-street happen to have no regular shops, there is still business done.

Numerous parlour-windows demonstrate the nature of the retail-trade carried on within; some, by means of a couple of "new-laid" eggs, as many loaves, and samples of sweetstuff; others by a tailor's card portraying the latest thing in coats and trousers; or a brass plate on door indicates the abode of a dressmaker capable of designing the "latest fashion" in costumes or Court dresses; the main characteristic throughout being that everything that can possibly be discoloured or mildewed, is so.

Lodgings for single men abound; ladies apparently being not desirable.

Strong odours, compounded of boiled greens, fried onions, bloaters, and toasted bacon, mingled with whiffs of old clothing, dustbins, and family washing, are invariable concomitants of these streets.

Shabby and forlorn hens and dried-up ducks shuffle about in the gutter, ever trending towards the greengrocer's shop, outside where they pretend they are in the country.

Dirty children sit and play on the door-steps, share the gutter with the ducks and fowls, or tear about the roadway, yelled at by frowsy mothers, who, bare-armed and buttonless, stand at the doors and discuss local affairs with their neighbours, or bargain with the costermongers, who at all hours of the day shout mackerel, cauliflowers, watercress, radishes and celery, paraffin-oil, firewood, clothes-props, etc., impartially, or chaff the coal-retailers or the milkmen who never fail in their daily and indispensable rounds.

But if one wants to study a specific district of back-streets, what can be more interesting, and also more accessible from the great hotels near Charing Cross, than Soho, a quarter with its own history and its own associations?

It was once the home of fashion, of which no trace remains, save the solid and beautiful houses wherein its votaries dwelt, and the special trades that ministered to their luxurious tastes (as to ours) - furniture-makers, dealers in antiques and articles of virtue, pictures, engravings, and works of art.

Soho has been the chosen haunt of foreigners for many years past.

Take as a rendezvous Golden Square, which lies at the back of the Quadrant: a square which, it has been said, " is not exactly in anybody's way, yet it leads to and from anywhere;" a correct definition, as from thence any part of Soho can be easily reached.

Round about are many back-streets, some of them short and narrow, but the narrowest certain to have been originally named Broad.

Great and Little Pulteney Street, Little Windmill Street, Poland, Carnaby, Berwick, Frith, Wardour, Gerard, Lisle, and Rupert Streets - the very names suggestive of ancient and noble families.

Amongst them can still be discovered, hidden from public view by the street-frontages, picturesque tiled roofs with dormer windows, and buildings covered with Virginia-­creeper from threshold to gable, delightful bits for any artists of the Herbert Railton order.

A great many of these streets are, like those described by Dickens, faded and tumble-down, with two irregular rows of tall meagre houses generally let out into lodgings where all kinds of small trades are plied, mostly by foreigners.

The doors of these tenements are seldom closed, and a row of much-used bells denoting the various floors, suggest that the lodgers wait upon themselves.

The shops in the neighbourhood cater chiefly for French and Germans, and remind one of the poorer quarters of Paris or Frankfort.

There are Gallic restaurants, and Teutonic restaurations, where dinners a la carte or a prix fixe can be had of fair quality and at astonishingly low prices; besides which, there are the usual London eating-houses and coffee-shops where plates of meat at threepence, coffee at a halfpenny a cup, and halfpenny slices of pudding are largely sold.

Round about are boucheries, where carcases are cut up into strange-looking joints that yet seem handier and less wasteful than those we are more familiar with; charcuteries, prettily decked out, where, besides pork, are displayed in tempting array, pates, galantines, pressed-beef, croquettes, etc., and every imaginable kind of sausage; boulangeries, in whose windows are the familiar long white loaves side by side with brown ones, and the Westphalian "pimpernickel."

Then one comes across crockery-shops, with the coarse but serviceable brown ware so much used in France, coffee-pots, pots-au-feu, jars, and the like.

Blanchisseuses display linen got up a merveille.

Modistes, chaussetiers and bottiers tempt the weaker sex with prettily-arranged and well-made costumes, hosiery, and dainty boots and shoes.

Here, too, can be found some of the very few places where can be bought the oval wooden boxes with black tops in which hats and bonnets are conveyed to and from the milliners.

Another characteristic part of London is Seven Dials in St. Giles.

In St. Andrew's Street, leading through it, birds, cats, dogs, gold-fish, snakes, lizards, and such small deer, are always on view.

Still more peculiar a region is a thoroughfare leading to the Waterloo Road, familiarly known as the New Cut, arrived at by crossing Westminster Bridge, and close to the Canterbury Music-­Hall.

The houses here present great diversity in size, and all are shops which sell at the "cheapest possible" to suit the necessities of their customers, who are of the poorest class.

Alongside the road are lines of stalls where fruit, vegetables, flowers, sweets, cats'-meat, old clothes and furniture, rat-traps, old door-handles and other metallic disjecta membra disport themselves.

On Saturdays and on Sunday mornings, the "Cut" is one of the most curious sights in London.

The place literally swarms with poor people intent on cheap-marketing, so that walking the pavement is for the mere flaneur almost an impossibility.

High Street, Shoreditch, the Mile End Road, and Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) are three other examples of these peculiar thoroughfares.

In the first of these, the small shops are incongruously interspersed with palatial buildings (banks, and the like), but, as in the New Cut, there is an unbroken line of stalls on the edge of the side-walk, where everything, including live birds and books, can be purchased, though for the latter there is seldom much demand.

Mile End Road is the New Cut on a larger scale, and the pavement being wide, the stalls do not impede entrance to the shops.

The best time to see this part of London is at night, when gas contends feebly with the flaring naphtha lamps on the costers' "pitches."

Middlesex Street, a turning off Whitechapel High Street, is no longer a den of thieves, though still rather a shady locality.

On Sunday morning a brisk trade goes on, in which the German element predominates, and Yiddish, as the peculiar bastard Hebrew is called, can be heard spoken on every side.

The specialties sold here seem to be salted gherkins, and fresh-water fish of all sorts.

Over the river at Walworth is a concentration of all the foregoing.

It is a quarter seldom explored by any West-ender, but worth a visit if only to see how retailers provide for the wants of the needy.

At the butcher's shop there is any amount of beef and mutton cut up into very small pieces, which the frantic salesman thrusts into the face of the passer-by, bawling out the price, which may range from sixpence to as little as twopence a pound.

The fishmongers deal largely in the coarser fish, and sell tons of whelks, periwinkles, mussels, etc., in the course of a year! while one would imagine that all the Ostend rabbits imported, and most of the pork ever pickled, found its way here!

Eggs, fruit, and vegetables are seen in vast quantities; and everything is disposed of at prices considerably lower than in the well-to-do parts of London.

Umbrellas can be purchased from itinerant vendors for ninepence or even sixpence; merino stockings, three pairs for a shilling; braces for the merest trifle; and at some of the stalls can be picked up for a few halfpence, articles generally flung into the dust-bin, such as broken knives (with or without handles), bits of rusty chain, old door-keys, etc.

Walworth Road is a place for shows, often located in some cellar, where mermaids, two-headed sheep, six-legged calves, and other creations of professional monstrosity-makers, are to be viewed for one penny.

At Walworth, the cockney dialect is heard to perfection, and on Saturday nights the air resounds with, "Nah then, lydies, walk in, walk in" "Sweet vilets, penny the bahnch"

" I sy, Imy, where yah gowin'? This wy to the shou!"

The overcrowding of the Metropolis is perhaps the most pressing social problem of the day, and the most difficult to cope with.

The poorer classes must live near their place of employment, being unable to afford even the smallest and cheapest railway-fare; while the value of land anywhere near the centres of business is so great, and the demolition of small houses thereon to make room for big warehouses so continuous, that the filthiest and most meagre lodgings are filled to overflowing, though let for rents that absorb nearly all the scanty earnings of the tenants.

The average rent paid for a one-room tenement in some parts is 3s. 10 3/4d. a week, while in Spitalfields it is between 4.s. 6d. and 6s.

Overcrowding is also due to the fact, that whereas the increase of population is estimated at from fifty to sixty thousand per annum, the number of new tenements is comparatively small, or, at any rate, disproportionate.

For example, in Kensington, one of the wealthiest parishes in the world, one quarter of the population live two or more persons in a room.

In Soho, ten per cent. live, on an average, four to one apartment.

In Whitechapel, the average is ten to a room - a density of about 225 persons to each acre.

In Spitalfields, 4575 houses are let out in single rooms, of which 1400 are occupied by four to eleven persons each.

But what are even these figures compared with those of St. George the Martyr, Southwark - containing the Borough Road, London Road, and Kent Road - one of the most densely populated parts of London, where 135,000 human beings are congregated in a single square mile, and whose insanitary condition is dangerous to the entire Metropolis!

There can be no doubt that one result of the terrible over­crowding, is the numerous plague-spots that exist in London, and in quarters where one would least expect them.

There is no need to read In Darkest England, to be made acquainted with their character and nature.

A neighbouring minister, parochial nurse, or district visitor, can take you there, and you can see for yourself.

For instance, in one part of Drury Lane, until recently, when they were condemned as uninhabitable, all the houses were in a state of hopeless dilapidation, from roof to basement; some had yards at the back, but no bigger than an ordinary table.

There were no sanitary arrangements to speak of, and the rain came through the broken tiles as it liked.

In one house, great holes were made throughout it by rats that swarmed everywhere, and even attacked children in their apologies for beds.

In another house, crammed with lodgers, the rate of mortality was so great - 129 per 1000 - that it soon left it tenantless.

But what kind of health can the inmates of such abominable dens hope to possess; and what idea of recreation can their offspring have!

As little as had Charles Kingsley's gutter-snipe, who, asked if he knew what the word country meant, replied, "Oh yes; we knows. The country is the yard where the gentlemen go to play;" his only rural associations being with some wretched enclosure full of rubbish-heaps, or a squalid, stinking cul-de-sac off Drury Lane.

But of all London slums, none are so bad as those to be found in the West-end, frequently not a stone's throw from fashionable thoroughfares and luxurious residences.

Do the wealthy dwellers in comfortable Kensington ever think of the Avernus almost in their midst?

The district known as Notting Dale is in the north­west corner of the parish, and comprises five streets - Bangor Street, Crescent Street, Kenley Street, St. Clement's and St. Katherine Street - lying close together.

It consists entirely of common lodging-houses and "furnished rooms."

Thieves, rogues, professional beggars, hawkers, and "unfortunates" are the inhabitants of this unsavoury district.

Even a casual passer-by cannot fail to be struck by the atmosphere of dirt and idleness that hovers over the place - crowds of loafing men, half-naked women, and unwashed children, utterly indifferent to everything but the ease of the moment, with habits worse than those of the beast, and in such a state of filth that the policeman on his beat is often compelled to hold his handkerchief to his nose as he passes.

As to the boys and girls, they are too utterly in the condition of "savage" for the School Board to tackle, and the first element of education instilled, when some charitable society does get hold of them, is, that once a week at least they must be washed.

Of religion and morality they have no idea; their only Deity is the "copper" in uniform, who, unless they can dodge him, occasionally marches them off to the "beak."

The death-rate in this district is appalling, 74 per 1000.

What this actually demonstrates, may be realized by the fact that the parish is in itself remarkably healthy, its rate of mortality - including Notting Dale - being only 14 per 1000.

No wonder that one in authority, born and bred in St. George's-in-the-East, declares that Notting Dale is worse than any part of the East-end.

"It has been called," says he, "the 'West-end Avernus.' It is rightly named; it is a perfect hell, and the worst district in London."

Distinct from the "regular-wage" earning community, there is an immense class in London, whose earnings are entirely precarious, some being, in unfavourable weather, cut off altogether.

First and foremost of these is the hard-working costermonger (under which denomination I include hawkers and stall-keepers), familiarized to West-enders by the clever impersonations of Mr. Albert Chevalier.

Whether the name is, or is not, derived from the vending of "costards," a species of apple, is uncertain, but the "coster" has existed for centuries and was a familiar figure in the streets of Plantagenet and Tudor London.

The stock-in-trade of the present-day coster is contained in a barrow, owned or hired, to which he is sometimes able to harness a donkey; but when he attains this height of prosperity, he, as a rule, calls himself a "general dealer."

Probably all costers at one time carried their goods in baskets, but the modern coster­monger rather looks down on his comrade, the hawker, who has neither barrow nor truck.

At night, the well-to-do coster, converting his barrow into a stall, lights it up with naphtha, the poorer one having to be content with the humble candle, as in the earlier times.

Besides fruit and the commoner vegetables, all kinds of cheap foreign fruit and tomatoes are sold by them, and, in their season, mackerel, herrings, cauliflowers, asparagus, melons, straw­berries, cherries, holly, cut flowers, and growing plants.

Costers, as a class, have made much progress of late years.

Their name used to be a term of contempt, and the bearers of it noted for roughness, but the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury and others on their behalf, have worked a wondrous improvement in their language and ways.

Amongst women, the most hardly-earned wages are those of tailoresses; and it is absolutely true that khaki coats have been given out to have buttons affixed and button-holes worked at the rate of 9d. per dozen coats; so that as it takes almost an hour to do the work of one coat properly, even if the poor seamstress is at it from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. (Sundays included), she would have earned at the week-end, the magnificent sum of 5s. 3d., out of which she has to buy her own thread.

The wages of the shirt-maker are even more shameful.

She has to "make up" a dozen white shirts for 3d.! so that if she could by any possibility do two dozen a day, her wages would not exceed 3s. 6d. a week!

This wretched remuneration for hard "sweating" is the result of the outrageous competition in the trades.

Other occupations for women - somewhat better paid - are the shelling of walnuts and peas on the confines of fruit and vegetable markets, paper-bag-making; sack-making; fur-pulling, choking to the lungs and blinding to the eyes; and the raking-over of refuse heaps in dust-yards, sorting out bits of string, flannel, cardboard, and rag, anything in fact that can be converted into paper or shoddy cloth.

But the most disgusting occupation for females, though not so uncertain, is the preparation of animal entrails for manufacture into sausage-skins; the greasy, slimy lengths of intestines are scraped until denuded of fat, etc., then turned inside out and thoroughly cleansed, again washed, and finally twisted up and dressed with salt for the market, the stench of the operation being nauseating.

For this, can be made from 12s. to 14s. a week.

Curiously-earned livelihoods are endless in variety: among them, that of the maker and vendor of fly-papers, with his cry of "Catch 'em alive, blue-bottles and flies," now and again breaking out into a more lengthy and poetical effusion

"Catch 'em alive,
Blue-bottles and flies.
I've got some papers
That 'ull stop all their capers;
Catch 'em alive," etc

of the onion-peeler, whose trying occupation stains the skin, and makes the eyes run with tears; of the sandwich-man, who parades the streets for 9d. a day; and of the creator and seller of those wonderful penny toys to be seen all over the city, but chiefly in Cheapside.

Then there are the miscellaneous vocations (of which one man may be engaged in several), such as "calling" people early in the morning, achieved by tapping at the windows with a rod until the sleeper wakes; oiling people's gates for a halfpenny a time; picking up the scattered oats, chopped hay, etc., found lying about cab-stands, and selling it to cabmen at a very cheap rate.

A few collect newspaper-contents-bills, and sell a quantity for a half­penny to unfortunate sleepers-out, who use them as a protection from the damp air and cold flags.

Then there are cab-runners - men who run after luggage-laden cabs to earn a copper by carrying the luggage into the house; and "cab-glimmers," who open and shut cab-doors, and with their hand protect the lady's dress from the wheel as she gets in and out of the cab.

The collecting of cigar-ends is another industry of the streets; these are sold to florists at from 6d. to 10d. per pound to fumigate plants with.

Pavement-artists make but an uncertain living at best, though now and again they make a "haul" when some enthusiastic passer-by is impressed by their "latent talent."

Many of these men do really draw the productions announced as "All the work of my own hand," but others get an expert to execute the pictures, pay for them, and pass them off as their own.

London also possesses a peripatetic army of street-traders who deal in anything out of which they can snatch a profit.

There is the perambulating oil-shop selling also soap, candles, etc., generally to be found in the East-end.

"Pussy's butcher," so he denominates himself in Islington, whose meat, as a matter of fact, is often eaten by the children of the very poor.

The "All 'Ot" man, who sells roasted potatoes (with a morsel of margarine and a pinch of salt), though not so much in evidence as formerly, is still to be found, in the winter, generally in company with the roast-chestnut vendor, at the corner of cold dull streets, and preferably outside a public-house, where also the cooked-whelk, mussel, and scallop merchant usually has his stall at night.

In the East-end, lads in American fancy costume are sometimes to be seen doing a good trade in candy.

Firewood and log-hawkers are numerous, giving a good-sized basket of chopped wood for a penny; the logs are rather too dear for the poor.

Then there are itinerant vendors of oil, who, with a barrel mounted on a barrow, go their rounds yelling out, "Pen', Pain!" i.e. paraffin by the pennyworth.

Lastly, there is the baked Spanish onion man, quite a unique street-dealer, who is, or was, to be discovered in Old Street, St. Luke's, and easily, if once you get on his scent, for, like the retailer of "Pain," his presence can be detected afar off.

Next:

London and the Shadow of Death: London's Hospitals