This walk through the central neighbourhood of St Giles uncovers a history of Londoners that weren’t famous, well-educated or well-heeled. You’ll see where poorer folks lived and worked, and hear how the middle classes considered them sub-human and dangerous, calling them vagrants, beggars, ragamuffins and street arabs living in rookeries, Thieves’ Kitchens and Little Sodom.

You’ll hear how they first spied on the poor and then went ‘slumming’ in their neighbourhoods, gawking at dosshouses where the poor could spend the night hanging over a rope or lying in a coffin. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which opened in 1728 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, made fun of the idea that the upper classes were more moral and human than the poor.

You’ll see buildings set up to ‘rescue’ the poor 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.