Now it’s trendy and pretty but Seven Dials was notorious for poverty and crime in the eyes of the Middle Classes. You’ll see where poorer working folks lived and hear how they were considered sub-human and dangerous, called vagrants, beggars, ragamuffins and street arabs living in Thieves’ Kitchens and Little Sodom. You’ll hear how they were first spied on and then the objects of slum tours, with the bourgeoisie gawking at street life and dosshouses where the poor could spend the night hanging over a rope. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which opened in 1728, made fun of the idea that the upper classes were more moral and human than the poor, but that was the belief of those who rarely if ever even saw them.
You’ll see buildings set up to save the badly-off from their misery: But were they always so miserable? This tour looks at middle-class prejudices and attempts to improve things that often punished the poor instead.
All our lives society has been represented to us as a hierarchy or pyramid in which the rich are located at the top, the middle class sits underneath and workers sprawl at the bottom. Anything lower than the bottom is called underclass, a lot of dysfunctional nobodies. Isn’t it still assumed everyone is striving to move up this ladder? Failure is constructed as happening downwards, a falling into an abyss – the word Jack London and Mary Higgs used to describe how the poor were forced to live.
For my history-walk about the poor in St Giles I did research on social reformers’ fear of cellars. How can that be? you’ll say, why, the best people now live in garden flats. From the 18th century for a long time cellar-living was considered to be appalling by those living well above ground. Cellar-dwellers were conceived of as more animal than human, an indistinguishable mass likened to moles and worms. Rescuers and reformers sought to raise up the miserable from their low position, Fallen Women first. In Gustave Doré’s drawing of the market in Dudley Street, the cellars are surrounded by old shoes and boots. Some see misery here; others don’t. Doré clearly felt sympathy with the cellar-dwellers.
What if instead of a hierarchy low-to-high we think of sides of the story: that the version we hear of current events and history is the Front Side, the official version told from the point of view of those who have the greatest communications-power. Their view places themselves at the centre, where stated aims and values are not questioned. The facade of the palace.
But for every such frontside, there are backsides, other realities, and that’s where the goings and comings of most people take place. Out of the limelight and usually out of historical accounts, too.
That’s the meaning in the title of my tour The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks. The front of the barracks-complex faces Hyde Park; horse guards in military regalia on their way to perform ceremonial duties exit under an elaborate late-19th-century pediment. A classic Frontside.
The back of the buildings face onto where for several hundred years poorly-paid soldiers, their girlfriends, wives, children and hangers-on scraped together livings. Knightsbridge (the street) was scene of goings-on that wealthy folks called disorderly, meaning drunkenness, carousing, noise, fights, streetwalking, numerous pubs and two major music halls whose raucous style of entertainment suited the working class. Sites of Low Pleasures, according to those set on raising the tone of the area.
The walk looks at the houses where servants and tradespeople lived in what were built as mean and cheap little houses but are today the height of fashion. I talk about stable lads and grooms, dressmakers and laundresses, all the trades needed to service the rich. Two well-known courtesans appear, both with good manners and nice clothes but always trying to persuade their admirers to grant them annuities to live on and houses to live in. They don’t seem to be working-class, but they were certainly working. And there’s the story of a lowly horse guard and his dollymop-turned-wife, struggling to make ends meet. One Frontside superstar does appear, the Duke of Wellington, because he got in a fracas with one of the courtesans. Oh and his superstar horse Copenhagen appears when we’re walking in Rotten Row in the park. It’s a horsey walk.
If you’re not an insider in ticket-buying circles, how to do it may not be obvious. Eventbrite is the name of an easy-to-use service that takes care of the financial transaction. If you search the Eventbrite website for topics you’ll be shown relevant walks. If you were to search for medieval women, for example, my walk Scratching out a living comes right up (and has little competition, which is kind of my point).
You can see what walks I have coming up via the tab on the top menu called Walks Calendar. The screenshot to the right isn’t clickable, but from this calendar the links take you to the same Eventbrite ticket-buying site. There are presently 5 walks listed; I’ll keep adding more – there’s no topic of London history that historians haven’t left women out of! I’ll be describing my thinking for each walk here on the blog, as I did for Scratching out a living: the Medieval Female Proletariat.
And there’s always following me on Eventbrite to receive alerts to new walks. (I know I’m being repetitive but I’m trying to get a new business off the ground so bear with me please.)
Now it’s trendy and pretty but Seven Dials was notorious for poverty and crime in the eyes of the Middle Classes. You’ll see where poorer working folks lived and hear how they were considered sub-human and dangerous, called vagrants, beggars, ragamuffins and street arabs living in Thieves’ Kitchens and Little Sodom. You’ll hear how they were first spied on and then the objects of slum tours, with the bourgeoisie gawking at street life and dosshouses where the poor could spend the night hanging over a rope. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which opened in 1728, made fun of the idea that the upper classes were more moral and human than the poor, but that was the belief of those who rarely if ever even saw them.
All our lives society has been represented to us as a hierarchy or pyramid in which the rich are located at the top, the middle class sits underneath and workers sprawl at the bottom. Anything lower than the bottom is called underclass, a lot of dysfunctional nobodies. Isn’t it still assumed everyone is striving to move up this ladder? Failure is constructed as happening downwards, a falling into an abyss – the word Jack London and Mary Higgs used to describe how the poor were forced to live.
The back of the buildings face onto where for several hundred years poorly-paid soldiers, their girlfriends, wives, children and hangers-on scraped together livings. Knightsbridge (the street) was scene of goings-on that wealthy folks called disorderly, meaning drunkenness, carousing, noise, fights, streetwalking, numerous pubs and two major music halls whose raucous style of entertainment suited the working class. Sites of Low Pleasures, according to those set on raising the tone of the area.
You can see what walks I have coming up via the tab on the top menu called