Sleeping rough in central London 1870-2020
In his essay Comers and Goers ( in Dyos, the Victorian City), the late historian Raphael Samuel surveyed the seasonal migration of labour into and out of cities in the late Victorian period.
He noted that many came to winter in London, where, depending on the weather, night shelters, strawyards as they were called by those who used them, funded by private charity, opened up each November. The shelters were free and without obligation. People could stay for up to a month and they were heated both with a huge open fire and generally. The largest was at Playhouse Yard Cripplegate. The alternative was the Poor Law funded Casual Ward where a stay was limited to two nights and had to be paid for by a days forced labour.
Samuel lists many other places where people slept rough in London including railway arches and around the main hotels where heat was to be found.
The ‘migrating classes’ as they were called by the promoters of the Leicester Square soup kitchen in 1850, have left remarkably few traces of their existence…No railway hotels mark the terminal point of their journeyings. No imposing clubs stand as memorials to the seasons they spent in town. The back street lodging houses where many of them put up have long since been swept away, though not their forbidding institutional successors- the ‘Free Dormitories’ and ‘Night Shelters’ promoted and endowed by late-Victorian philanthropy…it is not easy to imagine a time when men slept rough in the dark recesses of London Bridge and lined up in their hundreds with tin cans or basins at Ham Yard Soho or the midnight soup kitchens of Whitechapel and Drury Lane
150 years on some progress had been made. Earlier this year if night temperatures were around zero the Mayor of London opened night shelters for those sleeping rough who preferred to be indoors. Not all did of course for many reasons but the facility was there and advertised.
With the COVID-19 crisis Government funds were made available to temporarily house rough sleepers in hotels which many although not all took up.
Amelia Gentleman’s report for the Guardian on rough sleeping in central London in late April 2020 reveals a very Victorian situation. Not so much perhaps in terms of conditions which remain very tough but in terms of who is on the streets.
She details precarious workers pitched out of hospitality jobs when lockdown approached with little money to keep a roof over their head or eat and often below any kind of safety net that the Government has constructed.
It’s a reminder of what lockdown means for some but also of the kind of economy we should not be going back to once it is lifted…
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