How a slum dies: Part 2, in the 21st century
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yesterday’s essay inspired by a provocative new book, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise, asked how and why a slum dies, based on the gradual and not—so-gradual elimination of London’s 1880 Old Nichol.
In today’s developed nations, slums are where, as the Times’ reviewer put it:
We tend to associate poverty with unemployment and dependence.
Mumbai, 2007
In developing and emerging nations, however, poverty is associated with rapid urbanization.
But the list of occupations that were carried on within the Old Nichol’s cramped confines reads like a Victorian trade directory. There were furniture makers, satin weavers, cats’-meat sellers, ivory turners, french polishers, watercress hawkers, cobblers, omnibus-washers and dozens more. Many trades involved livestock, which sometimes cohabited with the humans.
Pigeons, songbirds, white mice, parrots and rabbits were kept in the tenements or cellars and sold in the Old Nichol’s bird and animal markets. One family shared its single room with six ducks. Another reared terriers and kept them in cages round the walls.
Slums are hives of economic activity; it’s just low-paid economic activity.
Dharavii,
Children were conscripted into the battle for life at an early age. They were, one Old Nichol survivor recalled in the 1970s, “born older than they are now”.
‘Born older than they are now’ – what an evocative phrase.
A girl of six would be expected to cook for the whole family and do the housework, while her parents and older siblings toiled.
Children of Old Nichol
These are things we forget – until we go to modern slums, and then we remember.
One woman rented out her three children to theatres as imps, goblins and angels, dosing them on gin in hopes it would stop them outgrowing their costly stage costumes.
Slum dwelling and poor health go hand in hand.
It was their resilience that made the Old Nichol-ites such a headache for progressives. They simply would not believe that others knew what was good for them better than they did themselves.
Perhaps they do. People spend more time with themselves than they spend with reformers.
Anarchists and socialists strove in vain to raise some spark of political awareness among them. One dispirited revolutionary reported that it was like trying to tickle an elephant with a straw.
Early in 1984, George Orwell’s Winston Smith pens of the proles (in his flagrantly illegal but sinfully sensual diary):
The man who was Winston Smith
Until they become conscious they will never rebel,
And until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
And his chilling coda:
It might have been a slogan from the Party.
War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery.
If you have lived your whole life in a slum, you have come to believe the world operates in a different way, and to have a well-scrubbed earnest reformer offer you a better life – that you might easily doubt, out of your experience. Often your skepticism will be justified; those who would exploit slum dwellers vastly outnumber those who will actually succeed in helping them.
When vaccination against smallpox was made compulsory for children under 14 it was defiantly rejected by the Old Nichol as “medical quackery”.
An easy fear to spread, especially if your vestry makes money on your economic servitude.
Compulsory school attendance, introduced by the education acts of the 1870s, was also seen as an unwarrantable interference with the lives of the poor, reasonably enough, since families needed their children to help earn bread.
If you believe that changing a slum is generational, you want to grow a healthy community by choosing your cohort and improving them, relying on father time to turn them into better-educated, better-paid, and therefore better-housed adults. That requires a patience and a constancy of political purpose that is hard to sustain:
When plans to demolish the Old Nichol and replace it with model dwellings for workers were mooted by the infant London County Council at the end of the 1880s, outrage exploded. It was “taking away poor people’s houses”. Demolition went ahead all the same, and the rubble of Old Nichol was used to create the mound of what is now Arnold Circus. But only 11 of the 5,719 Old Nichol residents consented to move into the new development.
Over the decades and centuries and continents, demolition/ rebuilding increases the residents’ housing burden, simply because the new homes are better. Some people are so poor that, in the absence of subsidy, they cannot afford the new accommodation. It tends to lead to a turnover in population, with the newcomers less poor than the emigrants. It happened in Boston’s West End; it happens in HOPE VI; it’s happening now in Sao Paulo.
The heroes of Wise’s story are journalists and middle-class do-gooders.
Even in their times, the Victorians’ self-important righteousness made them objects of derision by such exquisite critics as Lytton Strachey (in his surgically slim volume, Eminent Victorians)
Takes one to mock one: Lytton Strachey
and A. N. Wilson (The Victorians), but for all that they present a morally inflated target for the puncturing quill, they were the great altruists who changed how we think of the duties the rich and powerful have to those poor and powerless. So it was with the Victorian slum; it was not allowed to wither away, it was attacked on multiple fronts by multiple crusaders:
It was a Daily Telegraph reporter, Bennet Burleigh, who flushed out the identities of the profiteers who battened on the Old Nichol.
Burleigh covered wars from the Civil to the Boer
Good governance and reform grow in the sunshine. Registering property and making its ownership transparent is itself a reform move, and a good one. Making it illegal to receive rent without providing a written receipt and a taxpayer identification number is an even better transparency action.
He was helped by Lady Mary Jeune, a friend of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, who funded country outings for Old Nichol children, and set up the London Schools Dinners Association.
Lady Mary Jeune, who put her money where her mouth was
When in doubt, give the children a window on the world.
A QC, Montague Williams, had woollen blankets manufactured and distributed to the poor, bearing his embroidered monogram so that they could not be pawned.
A clever action: identification to avoid the market clearing.
I sign my work, from autobiography to blankets
The most remarkable Samaritan was Arthur Osborne Jay, a clergyman with high-society connections, who raised thousands of pounds to build a church, Holy Trinity. He imported mosaic work from
Did Old Nichol die? Certainly the place did, and the spontaneous community it represented also died. Less clear is whether the poverty died. Where did Old Nichol’s residents go? And were their lives better?
Whom did we grow up to be?
Once I’ve read the book, I plan to let you know what I find.
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